It came upon a midnight clear ....

I'm listening this morning to the late, great Ella Fitzgerald's performance of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," beautifully enunciated (so that the lyrics can be understood) in that wonderful voice of hers.

It's a carol appropriate for the troublesome times we find ourselves in during 2021, emerging as it does from another period of distress, expressing a longing for peace in a world that rarely has had it.

The carol, written in Massachusetts during 1849 by Unitarian minister Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876) and generally sung in the United States to a tune written for it by Richard Storrs Willis, is distinctive because it doesn't mention the baby Jesus, the holy family or Bethlehem.

Instead, it focuses on the song of Angels --- most likely, Sears took his inspiration from Luke 2:13-14,  "And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,  'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.' "

There was a lot to worry about in 1849 --- the Mexican War had recently concluded, Europe was being shaken by revolution, a substantial percentage of the U.S. population was enslaved, and the United States' troubled past was catching up with it as the cracks opened in its foundation by a slave-based economy were widening as civil war loomed on the horizon.

Take note of the third stanza of Sears' original poem, below. It's this stanza that most clearly expresses his vision. The carol as performed (or reprinted in hymnals and books of carols) rarely includes it. And Ms. Fizgerald has skipped the fourth stanza, too, in this performance. Even so, it's lovely (and relevant).

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, good will 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.

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring —
Oh, hush the noise ye men of strife
And hear the 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 splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.