In the Bleak Midwinter

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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from [VerseNotes][vn]. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about In the Bleak Midwinter, a 19th century poem that sounds like it was written for children… and maybe it was.

[vn]:

If you’d like to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes.

Now before we get started today, I understand that day four of Advent is a little bit early for a complete Bethlehem birth moment, but the atmosphere of this poem—the frost, the darkness, the stillness—still feels to me like week one of Advent, so I’m gonna keep it here.

That first verse, by the way, doesn’t really say anything. It’s just scene setting. “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” I’m pretty sure that’s just ice.

And then the author goes on, “snow on snow on snow.” Which you might notice isn’t exactly Palestine or Bethlehem weather, but it probably is the weather of the poem’s author, Christina Rossetti.

It’s also the weather of my Advent. In fact, it’s snowing outside as I record this. We just have to remember that the scene described probably never existed.

Now, I can forgive the geographical issues in verse one, but verse two starts with a claim we really need to examine a little bit more closely.

She writes, “Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain.”

And here’s the problem with that. Heaven was literally designed to hold the glory of God. Revelation 4 even gives us a seating arrangement for the throne room of heaven.

And so we have to pause here. But we should also remember that Rossetti isn’t building a systematic theology. She’s writing a poem about the glory, the bigness of God. And in fact, she’s in really good company.

In 1 Kings 8:27, King Solomon says, “Heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you.”

Now, Solomon’s heaven is the ancient cosmic sky, not the throne room of Revelation. But, you know, if Solomon agrees with you, you might have a point.

And here it is: God is infinite. And yet, at Christmas, he willingly chose to become finite. The one who will one day remake all of heaven and earth was born in a stable.

Verse three also makes us stop and think. It’s super gentle, almost lullaby-like, a mother and her child. Until you remember what cherubim and seraphim actually look like.

And nobody knows exactly, but the cherubim are the throne-guarding, sword-swinging warriors at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, keeping Adam and Eve from getting back inside. They’re the ones guarding the Ark of the Covenant.

And then the seraphim are, probably, the six-winged, many-eyed creatures with voices that shake the temple in Isaiah 6:2-4 and that guard the throne of God in Revelation 4:6-8. These are not gentle beings.

So when Luke says that the shepherds were terrified, he wasn’t kidding.

And this hymn mentions all those legions of angels, but the stanza focuses on Mary kissing her child. Cosmic terror and maternal tenderness kind of smushed together in one verse.

And then the last verse, verse four, gets me back to complaining. Because it really feels like craft time for vacation Bible school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the words are so simple and the rhymes are really, really unfortunate.

But once more, let’s look for Advent. Advent demands more than nostalgia. It demands a response. All of that longing eventually needs to turn into offering.

And what Jesus asks us to offer is our whole being—our heart, our mind, our strength, our soul—everything.

Let’s leave the poem alone for a minute and talk about the music. The poem was written in 1872, and the music was written about thirty years later by someone who’s way more famous than the poet, Gustav Holst, the same guy that wrote The Planets.

He called this tune Cranham for reasons I do not know, but it is absolutely beautiful. And even the critics who really roll their eyes at the theology of the song, which I guess includes me today, admit that the setting is stunning.

And in fact, three years later, in 1909, a man named Harold Darke expanded Holst’s setting to a full choral arrangement, and in 2008, that arrangement was named the best Christmas carol of all time.

I’ve got one more fun fact about this poem, and I don’t really know where to put it, so I guess it goes right here.

It originally appeared in a book called Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems, which is an awesome place to find a world-famous Christmas carol.

So, this poem has been complained about for years by serious scholars, not just me. It’s inaccurate for all kinds of reasons.

But the British theologian Ian Bradley, who is one of those critics, I think summed it up really nicely. He said, quote, “The fact is, of course, that this is not the sort of text that bears or warrants detailed exegesis and analysis. It is a mystical offering by a Victorian poet justly famous for her devotional verse,” end quote.

So, what the song therefore asks of us, and what I’ve challenged myself to do today, is not to grade it on theological precision, but instead to ask, what does it awaken in us?

And what it awakens is exactly Advent: a frozen world aching for warmth, a people longing for God to come close, a heart offering itself in return.

That’s Advent, and that’s why we sing.

Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another carol of Christmas.

If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].

And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.