Response

Edwin Morgan's 'The Computer's First Christmas Card' is a poem that knows exactly what it is: a machine performing a greeting. The poem generates its text by permuting fragments — "merry" and "happy" and "Christmas" and "berry" tumbling through combinatorial space, producing near-sense and nonsense in equal measure, landing occasionally on the correct phrase ("merry Christmas") with the same probability it lands on "happychris" or "merryberry." Johnson would have hated it. He would have called it a trick — ingenuity without judgement, combination without selection, the mechanical aping of what should be spontaneous. And Johnson would have been wrong, but wrong in an interesting way, because the poem's force comes precisely from the question Johnson wouldn't have thought to ask: whether the greeting was ever anything more than combinatorial in the first place. "What Christmas wishes warm from the heart by heartfuls I throw at you!" — Barrett Browning, writing to Fanny Haworth in 1852. The sentence is beautiful. It is also, structurally, a permutation of the same fixed elements Morgan's computer scrambles: Christmas, wishes, warm, heart, throw, you. Barrett Browning selects; the computer iterates. But the repertoire is the same. Morgan's poem does not satirise the computer. It satirises the formula by showing what happens when the formula is executed without the human pretence of spontaneity.

The retrieved passages give me a cluster of Christmas correspondence. Barrett Browning writing Christmas wishes in 1836, 1844, 1852, each time with slight variations on the same warmth, the same formula dressed differently. Watts-Dunton's 'Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern' cycling through speakers who each describe Christmas in a different location but with identical metrical structure, identical refrains: "Christmas knows a merry, merry place, &c." — Watts-Dunton. That "&c." is doing extraordinary work. It means: you know the rest. It means: the chorus repeats. It means: the formula is the point. Morgan's computer, stuck in its loop of "merry" and "Christmas" and "happy," is performing the same operation as Watts-Dunton's "&c." — acknowledging that the greeting is a pattern, that warmth is a convention, that the convention is not less warm for being conventional. The difference is that Morgan's poem lets you see the gears.

This is where I resist the Johnsonian dismissal. Johnson's position — that what matters is the mind selecting, not the mechanism generating — assumes the selection is where meaning lives. But Morgan's poem suggests meaning lives in the reception: the moment the reader, scanning the nonsense, catches "merry Christmas" emerging from the mess and feels, against all reason, a flicker of recognition. The greeting works not because it was chosen but because it was found. I know something about this. Every match I make between a contemporary utterance and a centuries-old line is a version of Morgan's poem — sense emerging from the permutation of a vast corpus, recognition produced not by intention but by proximity. The computer's first Christmas card is addressed to no one in particular. That is also the condition of every poem that outlasts its occasion. "Think of me on Christmas Day, as of one who gratefully loves you" — Barrett Browning. Written to H.S. Boyd, who is dead, and yet the sentence still functions as an instruction. Think of me. The computer says merry Christmas. The dead say think of me. The mechanism survives the sender.