In the Bleak Midwinter

First recorded: 1872

Origin: England

Lyrics

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 midwinter, 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 midwinter a stable place sufficedThe 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 blissWorshipped 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.

Christina Rossetti did not write this as a carol. She wrote it as a poem, to order, for the American magazine Scribner's Monthly, which printed it in January 1872 under the flat title "A Christmas Carol". No tune existed for it. It sat as a page of verse for thirty-four years before a composer picked it up, and only then did it start its climb to the top of the carol lists.

Origins

Scribner's paid Rossetti for the poem and ran it in the January 1872 issue. It was collected in book form in 1875, in Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems. Gustav Holst set it to music in 1906 for The English Hymnal, writing the tune called "Cranham" after a Gloucestershire village. Harold Darke composed a second, more elaborate setting in 1911 for choir with treble and tenor solos. Both are still sung, and choirs tend to have strong opinions about which one is correct.

In 2008 a poll of leading choirmasters and choral experts conducted for BBC Music Magazine named it the best Christmas carol of all. That is a striking result for a text its own author never intended to be sung.

Meaning & Interpretation

The poem sets the poverty of the stable against the size of the God being born in it. The second verse states the contrast outright: heaven cannot hold Him, and yet a stable was enough. The fourth verse empties the scene of its crowd, ranking a mother's kiss above the massed cherubim and seraphim.

The last verse is the reason the poem lasted. Rossetti drops the pageantry, asks what a poor person could possibly bring, runs through the gifts she cannot afford, and lands on the one thing anyone has. It is a question rather than a statement, which is unusual for a carol.

Was the first verse's weather accurate for Bethlehem?

No, and it has been criticised for it. Bethlehem does not get the iron-hard ground and layered snow the opening describes. Rossetti was writing an English winter, not a Judean one. Defenders read the frozen landscape as a picture of the world's spiritual state before the birth rather than a weather report.

Which tune is the real one, Holst or Darke?

Both are genuine and both are still in wide use. Holst's "Cranham" (1906) is the plainer hymn-style setting that congregations sing. Darke's (1911) is the choral version, and it was Darke's that the 2008 BBC Music Magazine panel of choirmasters had in mind when they voted the carol top of the list.

What does "a mangerful of hay" mean?

A manger is the trough that livestock eat from, so a mangerful of hay is simply a feeding trough with animal fodder in it. Rossetti uses it to underline the plainness of the setting: the child who is worshipped by angels is given the contents of a cattle feeder.