Poor world (said I) what wilt thou do
To entertain this starry stranger?
Is this the best thou canst bestow?
A cold, and not too cleanly, manger?
Contend, ye powers of heav’n and earth,
To fit a bed for this huge birth.

These lines come from Richard Crashaw’s devotional Christmas poetry, written in the mid-17th century amid England’s religious and political upheavals. Crashaw (c. 1612–1649), a Cambridge-trained poet associated with the “metaphysical” tradition, was driven from his fellowship during the Puritan ascendancy and later converted to Roman Catholicism, spending his final years on the Continent. The passage reflects the Baroque Catholic sensibility that marks much of his mature work: an intense, affective meditation on the Nativity that dwells on the paradox of divine majesty entering the world in poverty and physical abasement.

The speaker addresses the “poor world” in astonishment that it can offer the newborn Christ—“this starry stranger”—only a “cold, and not too cleanly, manger.” The poem turns the Nativity into a cosmic scandal: the Creator arrives as an infant, yet creation provides no fitting welcome. Crashaw heightens the paradox through extravagant contrast (“starry” vs. “manger”) and by summoning “heav’n and earth” to compete in furnishing a bed worthy of so “huge” a birth. The effect is both devotional and rhetorical: it invites the reader to feel shame at worldly meanness and to respond with inward generosity, reverence, and adoration.