Given the season, it’s fair to assume that at some point soon you will be hearing a rendering of Christina Rossetti’s In The Bleak Midwinter. For me, it was last Sunday evening, at our local church’s Christmas carol concert, and of all the carols we know and love (or at least tolerate despite the overkill of decades’ worth of repetition), this is one I can truly get behind, due in no small measure to Gustav Holst’s fitting musical setting.
Rossetti’s poem was first published (as A Christmas Carol) in the January 1872 issue of American literary periodical, Scribner’s Monthly (thus just missing Christmas, ironically), and it presents her unique version of the nativity story. It was set to music in 1906 by Gustav Holst (the composer of The Planets suite), and again by Harold Darke in 1911. Darke’s version has become a staple of the BBC’s Carols From King’s programme, which airs each year on Christmas day, but it’s Holst’s that brings the poem to life for me.
Here is the famous first stanza of the poem:
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone:
Snow had fallen, snow on snow
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.
Rossetti sets the pre-Nativity scene unequivocally: she piles on the snow (on snow, on snow) and the very sparseness of the language builds on the sense of bleakness introduced in the first line. We get it: it was a bleak landscape (surprisingly, given that the area is sub-tropical and snow only ever falls on the Golan Heights, but let’s not nitpick).
As the poem continues, we are introduced to the familiar juxtaposition of divine power being cast in the humbling circumstances of the lowly stable, with its shepherds and wise men, oxen and asses, cherubim and seraphim. It is a simple celebration of the Christian faith, a winter warmer of an ending to thaw out the bleak snows of the first lines. But it is also a celebration of motherly love, of the mother being the only one able to care for and love her child, despite the presence of heavenly hosts.
But only his mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the beloved
With a kiss
Rossetti’s poem is rightly remembered anew each Christmas, in part because of its simple language and message. With Holst’s tune, a candlelit church, and a congregation of bescarfed carollers, it’s guaranteed to get a late bloomer into the Christmas spirit. Here’s a wonderful rendition by the choir of Kings College, Cambridge…Merry Christmas!
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone:
Snow had fallen, snow on snow
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.
Our God, heaven cannot hold him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
Jesus Christ.
Enough for him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay:
Enough for him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air –
But only his mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the beloved
With a kiss.
What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can, I give him –
Give my heart.
