The Computer's First Christmas Card by Edwin Morgan

Morgan (1920–2010) was the last survivor of the 'big seven' Scottish poets of the 20th Century. He wrote in English, not Scots, and used a wide variety of styles from sonnet to concrete poetry. He also translated from many languages, and his translation of Beowulf has been the standard text in America. In 2004 Morgan was appointed the very first Makar, the Scottish equivalent of Poet Lauriate, and he kept the post until his death in 2010.

The Computer's First Christmas Card was written in 1968, at a time when computers were first beginning to impinge on public consciousness, and when Ron Mitchell was typing up his first programs on punched cards. It's a lovely example of concrete poetry, where the layout on the page is an important part of the work. The computer spouts a stream of Christmassy adjectives and nouns, trying to come up with an appropriate greeting—which it gets wrong.

In these days of scary AI it's a salutory and humerous reminder that these are just silly machines.

The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell

The writer beholds a vision of a new-born baby in flames, suffering agonies in the fire, which, says the babe, is to work 'man's defiled souls...to their good'. Finally, the vision vanishes…

And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas Day.

Robert Southwell was an English Catholic priest of the Jesuit Order. He was an author of Christian poetry in Elizabethan English and a clandestine missionary in Elizabethan England. After being arrested and imprisoned in 1592 and intermittently tortured and questioned, Southwell was eventually tried and convicted of high treason. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1595. Friendly onlookers tugged at his legs to make sure he was dead before the executioner could inflict the grizzly remainder of the sentence. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

There is some evidence that Shakespeare knew Southwell's poetry. And Ben Jonson certainly did; he remarked in a letter, 'so he had written that piece of Southwell's [The Burning Babe], he would have been content to destroy many of his [own]'.

A Christmas Carol by Tom Lehrer

Lehrer explains that his carol is the only one to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas in America, money. You can hear him sing it on youTube.

The Coming of the Magi by TS Eliot

This poem was first published by Faber and Faber between 1927 and 1931 in a series of illustrated pamphlets entitled Ariel Poems containing works by various poets.

The first few lines of the poem are enclosed in inverted commas:

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

Why just these lines? The poem continues as if the same person is speaking. The answer is that the lines are lifted almost verbatim from a sermon preached in 1622 by the English bishop Lancelot Andrewes:

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of
the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the
weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali,
‘the very dead of winter.’

Andrewes was a favourite of King James the I and VI, who was said to have slept with a copy of Andrewes' sermons under his pillow. Andrewes also supervised the King James translation of the bible.

Eliot wrote the poem in the year he was baptised into the Anglican Church. He revered the sermons and other writings of Andrewes; indeed one of Eliot's collections of essays is entitled For Lancelot Andrewes. Here is his essay on Andrewes, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1926.