Hark to the angels
OH hush the noise, ye men of strife/and hear the angels sing.’ The assault on ears and nerves by relentlessly jangly melodies— Jingle Bells, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, the fa-la-las and ding-dongs noisily played in shops—can obscure the messages and magic, uplifting and poetic, that underline much Advent music (‘Doorways to Heaven’, page 148).
That’s not to disparage the annual unification the Christmas repertoire brings—it’s a joyous feeling to know words and tune well enough to carol lustily in chorus—but to hear within the familiar verses words that comfort, that crystallise hope and conciliation with the tenderness and awe surrounding a newborn baby.
We hear it when the hoary coldness of Rossetti’s poem In the Bleak Midwinter gives way to the radiant warmth of a stable in which ox and ass and camel adore, and in the compromise suggested by Hark the Herald’s ‘Joyful, all ye nations rise/join the triumph of the skies’.
In While Shepherds Watched, written by Queen Anne’s poet laureate Nahum Tate, set to a tune by Handel, we can envisage the lonely shepherds on their bleak hillside consoled by visions of angels trumpeting good news.
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, written by a Massachusetts pastor, Edmund Sears, during a bout of depression in 1849, epitomises the sorrow at the state of the world we feel more keenly at this time of year (‘And ye, beneath life’s crushing load’), but concludes with the promise of resolution: ‘When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendours fling.’
The recent tragic violence around Bethlehem seems poignant when we sing of the ‘everlasting Light’ shining in her ‘dark streets’ and that the carol was inspired by the emotional response of the writer, another 19th-century American pastor, Phillips Brooks, at the view of the then little town from the Palestinian hills as he rode there from Jerusalem.
And it may be no accident that Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of a 19thcentury Northern Irish bishop, who wrote the words of wonderment in Once in Royal David’s City, is also responsible for that thankful countryman’s hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful.
Each year, the eternal messages of optimism in Christmas carols reassure us, reinforcing belief in the important things in life: peace, family, kindness, charity and the stability of a home. Human suffering from war, poverty, sickness and natural disaster is always most acutely felt at Christmas and, this year, we have political acrimony heaped upon us, too. It was never more important to wait ‘in solemn stillness’ to hear the angels sing.