Virginia Woolf once wrote a letter to a young poet friend, advising him to avoid the all-too-frequent trap of writing exclusively about “one single person”—himself. “Two hundred or three hundred years ago,” she remarks, “you [poets] were always writing about other people. Your pages were crammed with characters of the most opposite and various kinds—Hamlet, Cleopatra, Falstaff.” Woolf admired the strength and versatility of writers who could imaginatively inhabit and portray characters other than themselves. As such, she concludes saying that the best recipe for success in poetry is to “embark upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices.” In other words, she advised her friend to write narrative verse. 

All of us at Humanum Review would like to wish our readers a beautiful, joy-filled Christmas. May the Christ-Child bless you and yours! On this occasion we would like to offer you a gift of poetry from James Matthew Wilson's newest collection. 

The holy settlement of hours,
    Whose silence now descends like sleep,
    Who gathers us within its keep,
    And lets alone the hearth flames leap,
Affirms, for now, the only powers
Will be those we have claimed as ours...

I. Thursday

The bucket in the laundry room
is stored up on the highest shelf
and labeled, in black marker, MOM—
with six kids lugging water out
to chickens, goats, and grazing sheep,
our buckets tend to disappear.

Tonight, my husband fills it up
with water, lukewarm like the baths
we used to draw for curling newborns
in our apartment’s kitchen sink...

A blessed Christmas and wonderful new year to all of our readers! We hope you enjoy this literary gift to you: a poem from Caitlin Smith Gilson's forthcoming collection, Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words (Wipf & Stock, 2025).

Long ago I was young
I did not know it then
But it was for you
To be this dying comet of love
Finishing my soul in you...

Stargazer in Bethlehem

You looked back at me
In the split second before heartbreak
Claimed what remains of my creation

At the very moment
My arms and legs
Readied themselves for starless night
You became more real
Than earth revolving around sun...

Time rules over man. It propels him through life, which is short when compared with eternity, and ushers him through life’s events, which often seem inconsequential beside history’s kings and wars. All of man’s experiences exist in and through time, and the means by which man communicates these experiences and thoughts—language—is also temporally bound. The nature of a novel, a poem, a sentence, or even a word, signals its mortality. It exists in time; it begins, and it ends.

Reading Czesław Miłosz’s poetry can feel a bit surreal these days. Frequent visual echoes of his poems flash by on screens, images of cities turned to rubble, armored vehicles patrolling through wreckage, and refugees fleeing across eastern Europe. Miłosz’s poetry is partly a poetry of witness, work influenced by his first-hand confrontation of Nazi and Communist aggression during and after the Second World War.