Lyrics
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!
There's a tumult of joy
O'er the wonderful birth,
For the virgin's sweet boy
Is the Lord of the earth.
Ay! The star rains its fire while the beautiful sing,
For the manger of Bethlehem cradles a King!
In the light of that star
Lie the ages impearled;
And that song from afar
Has swept over the world.
Every hearth is aflame, and the beautiful sing
In the homes of the nations that Jesus is King!
We rejoice in the light,
And we echo the song
That comes down through the night
From the heavenly throng.
Ay! We shout to the lovely evangel they bring,
And we greet in his cradle our Savior and 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. He 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.
That follows a pattern found elsewhere in this collection, with poems like Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, 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.
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.’ It builds a cumulative sensory picture of the nativity scene through a rapid sequence of brief, vivid images, rather than through extended, connected narrative description.
That compressed, almost impressionistic poetic technique is 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.
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.
