Christmas has been a source of inspiration and intrigue for poets and saints from the days of the early Church right through to the modern day

Perhaps it is rank folly to ask when the very first Christmas poem was written. Who could ever possibly know? And what is a poem anyway? There have been so many definitions of poetry bandied about down the centuries. “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d” (Alexander Pope)? “The best possible words in the best possible order” (Coleridge, allegedly)? Some piece of verbal machinery that may or may not take in metaphor, rhyme, simile, and a general shapeliness? And so it goes on. And on.

And the idea of Christmas comes burdened with a multitude of vexations of its own, too. Are we talking about the arduous simplicities of a birth in an inhospitable place half a world away and a couple of millennia ago, or the Christmas of later fabrications, Germanic, Scandinavian, English-Victorian? I shall try to encompass a little bit of much of this in order to please as many as possible …

Some would argue that the very first Christmas poem is the prologue to the Gospel by that beloved disciple St John. Given that it was written in a prose of such beauty, gravity and exaltedness, does it not deserve to be christened poetry? Prose poetry – though there is nothing of the nitty-gritty earthiness of actually giving birth about it?