Lyrics
Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming,
As those of old have sung.
It came, a flow’ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
Isaiah 'twas foretold it,
The Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it,
The virgin mother kind.
To show God's love aright,
She bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.
This flower, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor
The darkness everywhere.
True man, yet very God,
From sin and death He saves us,
And lightens every load.
Public domain hymn text (Traditional, first published 1599). Words by Anonymous.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This carol’s original German text and melody are of anonymous, uncertain origin. Hymnologists generally believe they date from sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
The carol first appeared in printed form in a Catholic hymnal published in the German city of Cologne, in the 1580s — though the carol’s actual composition likely predates that first surviving printed appearance by some years.
The carol’s central image draws directly on Isaiah 11:1, which prophesies that ‘there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.’ Jesse was the father of the biblical King David.
The carol’s ‘Rose’ functions as a poetic reworking of that same prophetic ‘Branch’ or ‘rod’ imagery — transforming Isaiah’s botanical metaphor for the coming Messiah into the carol’s own central image of a rose blooming unexpectedly in the dead of winter.
Michael Praetorius, a significant German composer of the early seventeenth century, published an influential four-part vocal harmonization of the traditional melody, in 1609. That musical arrangement remains the basis for most performances and congregational singings of the carol to this day.
The tune’s most familiar modern musical setting comes from Praetorius’s early seventeenth-century arrangement of an already older, anonymous melody, rather than from any single original composer.
The carol’s gentle, restrained musical and poetic style is considerably quieter and more contemplative than many of the more boisterous English and American Christmas carols found elsewhere in this collection.
That reflects its origins within the German Catholic devotional tradition of the late medieval and early modern period. It is valued for its understated, almost hushed sense of wonder, rather than for any more overtly celebratory or triumphant tone.
