In the Christmas story, the memorable figure is the innkeeper with no room to spare. Joyce Kilmer goes looking for someone kinder and invents a stable-hand, a "hostler" who opens his stable on the night "Our Lady came." The poem is about hospitality, but it also makes a bolder claim: welcoming a stranger is the same as welcoming Christ. Its final couplet, "Your breast shall be to-morrow / The cradle of a King," asks the reader to become the stable.
The poem is built on an alternating plan. Six eight-line stanzas fall into pairs: one tells of the hostler, the next turns to "you." The hostler is "gentle," then "courteous," then "joyous," and his service grows closer to the child. First he gives food and bed, then he holds the bridle and spreads clean straw, and finally he kneels at the manger. The commands move inward in the same way. The first asks you to let the *gate* swing open on your yard. The second asks you to unlock the *door* of your house. The third asks you to unbar your *heart* and remove "the barrier of doubt" from "your soul's great portal." The title's two nouns are a first step, and the poem ends somewhere deeper than either. The pattern works like a house tour that finishes in the soul.
The verse is deliberately plain. It uses a loose ballad measure of longer and shorter lines, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyming: "name" with "came," "yard" with "barred," "wide" with "inside." The sound is that of a carol or a told story, and that suits the subject. The parenthesis "(And blessed be his name!)" sounds like a listener's spontaneous murmur. "(He is in Heaven to-night)" is a startling piece of tenderness, because the poem speaks of the hostler in the present tense and so collapses the centuries between him and us. The rewards he receives are carefully graded. Twice the poem repeats "And Jesus Christ has given him," first with "a glory round his head" and then with "an everlasting crown." The third reward needs no repeated phrase, because it is simply the moment when the child "Gave him His hand to kiss." The poem makes its most intimate image the highest prize.
The imagery works through light and doors. The lantern's "glow" shines out "across the snow," the manger is "radiant," and the small house will be "glorified." Snow is an interesting choice, since it belongs to a northern winter rather than to Bethlehem. It moves the Nativity into the reader's own cold night, where the traveler might actually turn up. The verbs also do a lot of the work: "unlatch," "unlock," "unbar." The poem is a sequence of undoings, and each one removes a smaller and more personal obstacle than the last. The questions in the fourth stanza, "What if your yard be narrow? / What if your house be small?", answer the usual excuse directly. The first host was poor too, and the poem suggests that a modest home is no reason to keep the gate shut.
Kilmer is best remembered for "Trees," and the same plain, devout manner is on show here. The poem's religious language, with its "Our Lady," is traditional, but its message is not tied to churchgoers. It echoes the Gospel idea that a stranger welcomed is Christ welcomed, and it keeps that idea concrete. A modern reader might notice that hospitality here comes with a promised reward: the guest "will glorify it all," and the hostler gets his crown. Whether that cheapens the kindness or only reflects the poem's faith is a fair question for discussion. The poem's strength is that it never lets generosity stay abstract. It gives you a gate, a lantern, a patch of straw and a person in need, then leaves you standing at your own door. The dedication to Richardson Little Wright is the only trace of a personal occasion the text supplies, and the poem does not explain it.