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I’m going to keep it simple this Poetry Friday with a brief excerpt from, of all the things, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” a poem and Christmas carol written mid-nineteenth-century by Edmund Sears<\/strong><\/a>, pastor of a Unitarian Church in Weston, Massachusetts. <\/p>\n I’ve been listening to some holiday tunes lately, as perhaps many of you are. As one of 7-Imp’s esteemed readers—who regularly runs after his hat<\/strong><\/a> “with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy”—told me in an off-blog conversation, “Christmas music seems pretty much unambiguously glorious to me. It’s like good songwriters and hymnalists lose all the artifice and bombast and sentimentality they’re prone to the rest of the year.”<\/em> To that, I say—rather uneloquently—word. He nailed it. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n One particular version of “Midnight Clear” I’ve been listening to is so stark and spare and beautiful in its simplicity that I’ve been doing double-takes on the lyrics every time I hear it. I’m including the second and fourth verses below. They get me every time. Those lyrics are perfectly exquisite. “Still through the cloven skies they come \/ With peaceful wings unfurled”: Case-in-point. <\/p>\n Those lyrics have also put those magical, mystical, spiritual messengers we call angels on my mind all week. These winged beings of light have always rather fascinated me in mythology and story. What has helped keep them on my mind for days now is that my four-year-old keeps pulling angel ornaments off our tree to play with and marvel over and ask me about. <\/p>\n Another thing about these lyrics: I think I consistently do a pretty good job in life with gratitude, with remembering that, compared to the balance of the rest of the world, I live well. Quite well. There’s something about the holidays for many of us that bring to mind those that don’t have it so easy, who suffer in one way or another and on levels physical, emotional, economical, and much more. I find myself thinking, as I listen to those evocative lyrics in the fourth verse of the song, the second verse listed below, that those words can be balm for those who agonize or ache in any way. That would be my hope. That’s what I’d tell them anyway. <\/p>\n Still through the cloven skies they come, O ye beneath life’s crushing load, p.s. I’ve never found an angel quote, for lack of a better phrase, better than G.K. Chesteron’s<\/strong><\/a>: “The reason angels can fly is that they take themselves so lightly.” <\/p>\n The classiest lady in the blogosphere, Elaine Magliaro<\/strong><\/a>, has tomorrow’s Poetry Friday round-up. <\/p>\n
\nWith peaceful wings unfurled;
\nAnd still their heavenly music floats
\nO’er all the weary world:
\nAbove its sad and lowly plains
\nThey bend on hovering wing,
\nAnd ever o’er its Babel sounds
\nThe blessed angels sing.<\/p>\n
\nWhose forms are bending low,
\nWho toil along the climbing way
\nWith painful steps and slow;
\nLook now, for glad and golden hours
\nCome swiftly on the wing;
\nOh rest beside the weary road
\nAnd hear the angels sing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![](\"http:\/\/blaine.org\/jules\/songoftheangels.jpg\")
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