Christmas in Thailand

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices
. . .
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

I first came across this poem in my first year at King’s, in Carol Everest’s English 211 class. My first impression of the poem quickly got mixed together with images from Yeats’ parallel poem, and well as images from his “Second Coming.” It wasn’t until years later, when I taught the poem in my own first-year English course at King’s, that I took a closer look at the poem’s imagery, history, and startling questions. More recently, I taught this poem to one of my advanced ibT TOEFL students at Yosei ELP. Perhaps it was this student’s totally fresh perspective and honest questions, or it might also have been my own recent experiences as a foreigner in a strange land, but I began to see glimpses of my own life in Eliot’s words. At the candle light service we attended with Norma and Gordon, the preacher quoted lines from this poem,.and I carried them with me throughout the trek. There were a few moment during those two days when I saw images of what that first Christmas might really have been like...straw-thatched shelters, poverty, night fires going out, cattle on the hillside, and wild poinsettias framing a rustic village setting. Beauty and ugliness juxtaposed, stirring thoughts, and forming questions that I cannot answer.