What child is this, who, laid to rest,
On Mary’s lap is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing;
Haste, haste to bring Him laud,
The babe, the son of Mary.
Why lies He in such mean estate
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christian, fear: for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
So bring Him incense, gold, and myrrh,
Come, peasant, king, to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Public domain hymn text (1865). Words by William Chatterton Dix.
The Story Behind the Hymn
William Chatterton Dix, an English insurance company manager who wrote hymns and other devotional poetry purely as a private spare-time pursuit alongside his regular professional career, wrote this hymn's text in 1865 while slowly recovering at home from a severe illness that had left him bedridden for an extended period and, by his own later personal account, in a state of genuinely significant spiritual crisis and near despair throughout much of his prolonged convalescence. During this same extended period of recovery, Dix wrote a considerably longer poem titled 'The Manger Throne,' from which the specific verses eventually used for this shorter congregational hymn were later selectively extracted for actual church singing.
The traditional English folk tune paired with Dix's own words, generally known as 'Greensleeves,' carries a much older and originally entirely secular musical history of its own, traditionally associated since at least the sixteenth century with a well-known English ballad specifically about unrequited romantic love, a melody already centuries old and thoroughly secular in its original cultural associations by the time Dix's own sacred Christmas text came to be paired with it.
This specific pairing makes the resulting hymn a particularly clear and well-documented example of explicitly sacred devotional words being deliberately set to a considerably older, originally entirely secular tune, a genuinely common and long-established practice found throughout much of the broader history of English hymnody more generally, in which already familiar, well-loved popular melodies were regularly and deliberately repurposed by hymn writers to carry entirely new devotional religious texts, allowing congregations to learn new sacred words considerably more quickly by attaching them to a tune many singers already knew well from an entirely different, non-religious context.
