Christopher Jobson takes us through one of his favourite Christmas Carols.
Among the nation’s favourite Christmas carols, In the Bleak Midwinter is an exquisitely evocative lyric by Christina Rossetti, sister of the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was originally published as a poem in a monthly magazine in 1872 and in a book three years later. It gained popularity in 1906 when the English Hymnal was published in which it appeared set to a tune by Gustav Holst called ‘Cranham’. Its immediate popularity was confirmed when shortly after Harold Darke,a young music student, composed a setting for choir. Later in life Darke became director of music at King’s College Cambridge where it is often sung on Christmas Eve.
Christina Rossetti came from a close literary and artistic family. Her Italian father was a political exile and as Professor at King’s College, London, was a distinguished Dante scholar. Her mother, sister of Byron’s doctor, also had literary connections.
Christiana was the youngest of four, the eldest, controversially for those days, became an Anglican nun. Educated at home by her mother, although her health was delicate, evidently Christiana enjoyed a happy childhood and started to write early. They attended Christchurch, Albany St, where the Rev. William Dodsworth was the Priest. This was in the high church tradition of the Oxford Movement: Dodsworth was previously at the Margaret Chapel (later All Saints Margaret Street) and, like Newman, was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851. Christina as a devout high Anglican greatly influenced by Pusey and the Tracts for the Times had a discipline of daily prayer, Bible reading and spiritual reading of such works as Keble’s Christian Year.
The poem, like several of her other poems, seems to say much more than the basic meaning of the words.
The five-verse meditation on the wonder and meaning of the Incarnation leads us step by step to adoration and oblation. This perennial carol is in stark contrast to most other Christmas songs, its simplicity and directness is both forceful and compelling. The sombre opening is cold and hard hitting brilliantly using monosyllables and repetition, ‘snow on snow’ etc. This is contrasted with the warmth of the ‘manger full of hay’, ‘the breast full of milk’ and, in a beautiful allusion to the Virgin birth ‘the kiss’ given ‘in her maiden bliss’. The second verse is a conversation between two spiritual conditions reflecting on the paradox of the Incarnation.
The remaining verses focus on the birth of Jesus Christ, and feature many images we associate with the nativity, the manger in a stable, animals, angels, shepherds, and the Wise Men. The meaning of the words lie in their simplicity – the stable in a bleak midwinter’s night, ‘enough’ for the baby Jesus. It focuses on the simplest yet truest gift of all, love. “What can I give Him, give my heart.”
Written with grace and tenderness from a devout heart it speaks directly to the heart (Cor ad cor loquitur).
Christopher Jobson
Feature Image: Adoration of the Shepherds, oil on canvas, G v Honthorst.fe 1622, Wikicommons, PD