Sounding Childhood

Hark the Herald Angels Sing



Charles Wesley’s most famous carol and most popular for children was “Hark! The herald angels sing!”  At first, this makes sense: the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have embraced the hymn as clearly for children, featured in the Charles Schultz’s Charlie Brown Christmas special of 1965, for instance.  However, Charles Wesley first published it in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), not, notably, his Hymns for Children (1763). 

Wesley originally began the hymn as “Hark! How all the welkin rings/ ‘Glory to the King of Kings,” but George Whitfield gave it its more famous first line, "Hark, the Herald Angels sing..."  In 1855, W. H. Cummings  breathed new life into Wesley’s hymn by setting it to a tune by Felix Mendelssohn, usually designated as "Mendelssohn" since.

Clearly, many 19th century editors saw the hymn as having appeal and benefit to children. 
One appeal is its happy exuberance expressed in multiple uses of exclamation points, engaging alliteration, and a pulsation stemming from short, trochaic couplets:

Hark! the herald angels sing,
‘Glory to the new-born King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!’ … (v. 1, Hymn 120, Methodist Sunday-School)

Mendelssohn’s tune as arranged by Cummings matches the pulses through its melodic lines which repeat (lines 1 and 3).  The fifth and sixth lines take on a child-like beseeching quality as they stretch into and remain in the upper register. Still, its language and concepts are better understood by adults.  For instance, “God and sinners reconciled” begins an intentional focus on the Incarnation which quickly usurps the Nativity scene in theologically dense language:

            Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
            Hail the incarnate Deity!  (v. 2)

The Atonement is then invoked, again in complex imagery if powerful poetic repetition:

            Born that man no more may die,
            Born to raise the sons of earth,
            Born to give them second birth.  (v. 3)

In a Wesleyan verse not often reproduced in the twentieth century but found throughout nineteenth-century children’s hymn books, we find reference to Adam, a reminder to readers of Original Sin and the need for Christ’s descension to earth, which surely sobers a festive Christmas hymn:

Adam’s likeness now efface,
Stamp Thine image in its place;
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in Thy love. (v. 4)

Note the poetic complexity. “Offspring of a virgin’s womb” succinctly but evasively explains the Virgin birth.  Too, its use of puns (“Hail the Sun of righteousness” v. 3), paradox (“Born that man no more may die” v. 3), and metonymic imagery (“woman’s conquering seed” v. 3) take the hymn well beyond a child’s easy comprehension. 

Nevertheless, its currency continued through 1890s hymn books and certainly into the 1900s.  This hymn thus models the frequent use of adult concepts in hymns anthologized for children, the Victorians expecting both theological and poetic understanding from their smallest of citizens.
 
You can hear an earlier-recorded version, from my 2015 Hymn Camp, here.

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