It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

Lyrics

It came upon the midnight clear,
that glorious song of old,
from angels bending near the earth
to touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,
from heaven’s all gracious King!"
The world in solemn stillness lay
to hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come,
with peaceful wings unfurled,
and still their heavenly music floats
o'er all the weary world;
above its sad and lowly plains,
they bend on hovering wing;
and ever o'er its Babel sounds
the blessed angels sing.

And ye beneath life's crushing load,
whose forms are bending low,
who toil along the climbing way
with painful steps and slow;
look now, for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing;
oh rest beside the weary road
and hear the angels sing.

For lo! the days are hastening on,
by prophet bards foretold,
when with the ever-circling years
comes round the age of gold;
when peace shall over all the earth
its ancient splendours fling,
and the whole world give back the song
which now the angels sing.

History

"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" was written by the American Unitarian minister Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876), who was born in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and died in Weston, Massachusetts. Ill health forced him to leave active ministry in 1847 and he returned to Wayland, Massachusetts, where he devoted himself to writing; the poem is generally dated to 1849, while he was serving there as a part-time preacher. It first appeared, without music, in the Boston newspaper the Christian Register on 29 December 1849, a few days after Christmas, signed only "E.H.S." Its editor, John Hopkins Morison, read it at a Sunday-school Christmas event in Quincy.

The poem originally ran to five stanzas of eight lines, each in the common metre double (8.6.8.6 D). Hymnals usually print four, and hymnary.org notes that the third stanza is the one most often left out, with the fourth the next most common. Sullivan's NOEL setting dropped the last stanza and rewrote the fourth, while the Sarum Hymnal of 1868 altered the final stanza's wording. Sears reprinted the hymn with small changes in his Sermons and Songs of the Christian Life (Boston, 1875).

The text is unusual among Christmas hymns for what it leaves out: hymnary.org observes that it never mentions Christ or his birth, and one modern commentator observes that its attention falls less on Bethlehem than on Sears's own time and the questions of war and peace. It has long been assumed that the poem responds to the recently ended Mexican-American War, but this is an assumption, and the Hymnology Archive notes that one commentary links one stanza with the unrest of 1848 and after. Erik Routley called it "the first Christmas hymn in English with a social message" (The English Carol, 1958). Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, as summarised by hymnary.org, ranks it with Sears's other Christmas hymn, "Calm on the listening ear of night", among the best on the season in English.

Two tunes dominate. In the United States the words are usually sung to CAROL by Richard Storrs Willis (1819-1900), first published in 1850 in his Church Chorals and Choir Studies, though the earliest known printing with Sears's words is from about 1874. In Britain and the Commonwealth the usual tune is NOEL, an English traditional melody arranged by Arthur Sullivan and published in Church Hymns with Tunes (London, 1874); it is thought to be related to the folk tune of "Dives and Lazarus". St Peter's channel also carries an earlier recording by Cantoris, titled "It came upon a midnight clear | Hymn with Lyrics · Cantoris" (2022).

Performance

This recording, performed by St Martin's Voices, runs 3 minutes 28 seconds and was published to the church's YouTube channel in December 2024. It sings four verses of the text.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org · hymnary.org · hymnologyarchive.com · St Martin's Voices recording and Words book