HERE WE COME A-WASSAILING
BOTTUM, JOSEPH
Casual HERE WE COME A-WASSAILING Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes and What the gladsome tidings be and We three kings of Orient are—to say nothing of if thou knowst it telling: Have...
...It feels old...
...Or I guess that should be: The songs of Christmas, noticed thou, / the strangeness fi lled with are—and how...
...The singers seemed to like it when I gave them the four verses I fi nally managed to scribble out...
...Augustine came to Canterbury, England has been full of local hymns, from “Christus Est Natus” to “The Cherry Tree Carol...
...JOSEPH BOTTUM...
...That feeling of oldness, that power to seem traditional, remains a requirement of the music—even though the Christmas carol is essentially a Victorian invention...
...The Victorians were right: Christmas carols need to sound traditional...
...English doesn’t use the which much any more...
...It’s incompetent poetry, fi ller to make a rhyme of the most na?ve sort—by name, forsooth— and it’s really charming in its way...
...The original meaning was “rest” in the sense of “keep,” requiring the comma in a different place: God rest ye merry, gentlemen, a prayer that God keep joy in the hearts of those gentlemen...
...Forty hours later, I was still at it...
...And the usual call for joy in the chorus: Rise up (they sang), rise up (they sang...
...Despite all my wish to be inventive, I ended up with standard narrative: Rise up, shepherds, raise your eyes: the angels sweep the skies...
...Much of what the Victorians did, however, was write new songs they tried to make sound traditional...
...What same...
...The universal Christmas canon they established contained some genuinely older songs: “The First Nowell,” for instance, and the Wesleyan “Hark...
...Standard, usual: the same old Christmas stuff...
...Easy this not is...
...How that in Bethlehem was born / the Son of God by name, of course, and there’s something wonderful about that line...
...But then, this year, I was asked to write a Christmas song (“something new, but make it sound old, okay...
...Ever since St...
...It feels right, somehow...
...Not that this stops them from spiking the eggnog at the offi ce party, but at least it might lessen the next day’s hangover...
...They want to come from the deep places of the language, because they’re trying to speak of the deepest things of the world...
...Casual HERE WE COME A-WASSAILING Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes and What the gladsome tidings be and We three kings of Orient are—to say nothing of if thou knowst it telling: Have you ever noticed just how weird the grammar and syntax of Christmas carols are...
...All cold stains of sin and winter washed away by his birth: love will make the world new green and wonders fi ll the earth...
...Song of songs and king of kings— such joys our Savior brings...
...Listen, Lordings, unto me, a tale I will you tell, it opens, which, as on this night of glee, in David’s town befell...
...The Herald Angels Sing...
...Still, when carolers sing it out, the phrase seems to come from the authentic heart of the language...
...Rise up and sing: the world will spring fresh as the fi rst day’s morning...
...It sounds old-fashioned,” they said—the which is about as much praise as I could hope for...
...Surely, I thought, it will be simple to take the melody and dash off words better than this mess...
...But maybe that’s all right...
...they have to feel old even when they’re new...
...But the Victorians—especially Henry Ramsden Bramley and John Stainer, with their 1871 collection Christmas Carols New and Old—were the ones who systematized it all...
...and my sympathy for those poor carol writers suddenly increased...
...Like snowfl akes, they swirl and dance, a storm of wild surprise...
...I used to mock the result: the endless “thees” and “thous,” the pretentiously archaic syntax, the inversions and padding for rhyme...
...You’d think that would create some which-witch confusion for modern singers, but, in my experience, not even children hesitate at the line...
...The weirdest may be “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” whose phrasings are now so alien that even the fi rst line gets regularly mangled— punctuated (and sung) as God rest ye, merry gentlemen, which suggests the gentlemen have made so merry that God needs to send them sleep, saving us from their wassailed warbling through the streets...
...Who could ever fulfi ll that desire...
...I started with Bramley’s own “Carol for Christmas Eve”—a little-remembered song with a strong anthem for its melody but lyrics with all the worst Victorian faults...
...Not that people didn’t sing seasonal songs before the nineteenth century...
...Even odder is the moment when we’re told that the bless?d babe was laid within a manger—the which his Mother Mary / did nothing take in scorn...
...Meanwhile, a later verse tells us that a bless?d angel came / and unto certain shepherds / brought tidings of the same...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 14
