Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
The carol was written by Massachusetts native Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876). Sears earned a degree from the Harvard Divinity School and became ordained a Unitarian minister in 1839, serving congregations throughout Massachusetts.
In 1849, Sears was writing a Christmas Eve message for his congregation. As he worked on his sermon, he was a troubled man. While he believed that Jesus was the Son of God and had died on the cross for man’s sins, he also believed that every Christian should be involved in reaching out to the lost, helpless, and poor. It was the poverty and the hopelessness of the people he touched in the slums that sickened his heart and blocked his progress.
As Sears struggled, he thumbed through his well-worn Bible. In the second chapter of Luke, the minister was touched by the eighth and ninth verses: “And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.”
After considering the miraculous nature of that long-ago moment, Sears picked up his pen and jotted down a five-verse poem he called “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” He then retrieved from his files, another Christmas poem he had written a decade before: “Calm on the list’ning ear of night comes heaven’s melodious strains.” from which he pulled ideas. Beginning his message with his older Christmas poem, he quickly wrote a short sermon and decided to end his Christmas service with the inspired words of his newest poem.
Sears managed to point out that God, in the form of a child, was entering a world that sorely needed his help. He wanted his congregation and the world to hear those cries as he did. Today Sears’s poem turned carol is considered joyful and uplifting. Yet when first delivered, its audience probably saw it as more a charge or challenge than the story of a miraculous birth in a faraway land.
As the co-editor of the Monthly Religious Magazine, Sears could easily submit and publish hymns, which he often did. He also submitted It Came Upon a Midnight Clear to The Christian Register, which published the carol in its December 29, 1849 issue.
In his youth, Sears developed a great love for poetry. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear was written during a time of great social unrest. Americans were still dealing with the effects of the Industrial Revolution; the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) had just recently ended; the California Gold Rush was creating excitement, but was also disrupting the lives of men and women caught up in Gold Fever, and tensions over the issue of slavery in America were growing, eventually leading to the Civil War.
Perhaps the Gold Rush, in particular, inspired Sears, whether consciously or not, to include three different references to gold in his carol (“harps of gold,” “golden hours” and “Age of Gold”). It comes as no surprise that Sears’ carol laments the “woes of sin and strife, the world has suffered long” and focuses on the angels’ message of peace at the birth of Christ
He portrays angels bringing peace to a still-weary world—angels hovering above “sad and lowly plains.” Sears portrays a painful view of life, with its “crushing load” —and “painful steps and slow”—and a “weary road”—but offers the hope of “glad and golden hours” that will “come swiftly on the wing.” And he looks forward to the fulfillment of prophecy—” When the new heaven and earth shall own the Prince of Peace their King.”
Sears initially published It Came Upon a Midnight Clear as a poem. Later, Richard Storrs Willis (1819-1900), a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune would write the tune we now use for the song.
Willis was born to a prominent family in Boston. He had received the best education that America had to offer, and when entering Yale in 1837, quickly earned distinction in literary and musical societies. He went on to publish several books and collections of music (his arrangement of “Fairest Lord Jesus” is still widely used). Willis also studied music in Germany, meeting and becoming friends with Felix Mendelssohn.
In 1848 he returned to the United States and became the music critic for the New York Tribune. An avid reader, Willis probably found Sears’s poem in the Christian Register. Earlier the composer had written a tune he called, simply, “Carol.” He discovered that this melody perfectly fit the lyrics of the poem. Willis’s combination of music and words was first published in 1850 with the uninspired title, “Study Number 23.” A decade later, using a new, updated arrangement, Willis republished the song as “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night.” It is this second version that is still sung today.
Exactly how the tune came to be used with It Came Upon a Midnight Clear is not known. A letter Willis wrote simply states, “On my return from Europe in [1876], I found that it [the tune] had been incorporated into various church collections apparently to Edmund Sears’ text.” However, in England, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear would be paired with the tune ‘Noel,’ composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1906).
During World War I, American troops sang “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” throughout France during the holiday season. Thus the song went to war and came home with a generation of men who made it a part of their holiday traditions. Twenty-five years later, U.S. troops took the song back to the front lines of World War II, and entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore performed the haunting carol throughout the Pacific and Europe at U.S.O. shows. What attracted them were the words which voiced their own prayers of “peace on earth” as well as those penned by Edmund Sears a century before.