ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the Christmas cycle, from the Nativity to Candlemas. It also describes that Claudel's liturgical sensibility found expression in commentaries on the seasons and great Christological feasts of the Church year and the saints whose commemorations punctuate those seasons. The vastness of ltendue is mirrored by the extent of la dure entertained in it as the history of ancient Israel and the pagan nations of the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East is conjoined with the Nativity event and the drawing to the Crib of Claudel's own contemporaries. In Claudel's lifetime, the Latin church still kept 1 January as the Circumcision of our Lord. The Epiphany is a complementary feast to Christmas and it may be useful background to Claudel's poem. In the reformed Roman calendar of 1969, Palm Sunday appears as Passion Sunday, in Claudel's lifetime it would have been the second Sunday of Passiontide.
