There’s a song in the air!
There’s a star in the sky!
There’s a mother’s deep prayer
And a baby’s low cry!
And the star rains its fire while the beautiful sing,
For the manger of Bethlehem cradles a King!
Public domain hymn text (1872). Words by Josiah G. Holland.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Josiah G. Holland was an American novelist, poet, and magazine editor who co-founded Scribner's Monthly, an influential American literary magazine, and who wrote this hymn's text in 1872 primarily as a poem for general literary publication rather than as a piece specifically intended from the outset for congregational hymn singing, following a pattern found elsewhere in this collection with poems like Christina Rossetti's 'In the Bleak Midwinter' (hymn 169), which similarly began as secular literary poetry before later being set to music as a hymn.
Holland's considerable literary career extended well beyond this one poem; he wrote numerous popular novels and served as a prominent public commentator on American cultural and social life during the post-Civil War period, and his hymn writing represented only a small portion of his overall body of published work, most of which had no connection to religious verse at all.
The poem's structure moves through a series of parallel exclamations — 'there's a song,' 'there's a star,' 'a mother's deep prayer,' 'a baby's low cry' — building a cumulative sensory picture of the nativity scene through a rapid sequence of brief, vivid images rather than through extended, connected narrative description, a compressed, almost impressionistic poetic technique somewhat different from the more narrative style found in many other Christmas hymns represented elsewhere in this collection.
Karl P. Harrington, an American classics professor and hymnal editor, composed the tune considerably later, and the completed hymn became a popular seasonal favorite specifically within American congregational singing, treasured in part for its unusually compact, image-driven poetic style compared to the somewhat longer and more discursive verse structure common to many other nineteenth-century Christmas hymns.
