Twelve Days of Carols, 2: The Sun of Grace

All the merrier is that place,
The sun of grace him shineth in.

1. The sun of grace him shineth in
On a day when it was morrow,
When our Lord God born was,
Without sin or sorrow.

2. The sun of grace him shineth in
On a day when it was Prime,
When our Lord God born was,
So well he knew his time.

3. The sun of grace him shineth in
On a day when it was Undern.
When our Lord God born was,
And to the heart stungen. [pierced]

4. The sun of grace him shineth in
On a day when it was None,
When our Lord God born was,
And on the rood done. [put to death]

This carol immediately appealed to me when I first saw it, mostly because the refrain is so pretty.  It's somewhat difficult to parse, but the general idea is clear enough, so for once let's not worry about the grammar.  The carol is from the manuscript Sloane 2593, home of many now-famous carols including 'Adam lay ibounden', 'Lullay myn lykyng', 'I syng of a mayden', etc.  It has something of the folk-song about it, making use of the repetition you find in counting songs and game songs.  There are plenty of such songs from the Middle Ages on both secular and sacred subjects; this carol probably fits in best somewhere between the 'Seven Joys of Mary' songs and 'Tomorrow shall be my dancing day', which also tell the story of Christ's life from birth to death in an incremental, repetition-with-variation kind of way.

The frame for the counting in this case is provided by the canonical hours for the morning from Matins ('morrow') to midday - nicely aligning the 'sun of grace' with the sun rising through the day.  In the modernised version above I've swapped round the last two verses from the original (which you can see below) because I think it makes more sense that way: the last line means 'died on the cross', and so really should come before 'pierced to the heart'.  It's not clear whether 'non' means noon (the sixth hour) or None (the ninth hour), and 'undern' can refer either to Tierce (the third hour) or midday/noon.  But again, you get the general idea.

Al the meryere is that place,
The sunne of grace hym schynit in.

1. The sunne of grace hym schynit in
In on day quan it was mor[we],
Quan our Lord God born was,
Withoute wem or sorwe.

2. The sunne of grace hym schynit in
On a day quan it was pryme,
Quan our Lord God born was,
So wel he knew his tyme.

3. The sunne of grace hym schynit in,
On a day quan it was non,
Quan our Lord God born was,
And on the rode don.

4. The sunne of grace hym schynit in,
On a day quan it was undy[rn].
Quan our Lord God born was,
And to the herte stongyn.

I was writing this post yesterday when I came across George Herbert's poem 'Christmas', the first part of which I posted yesterday. This is the second part:

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.


'A willing shiner' is such an odd, and yet lovely way to describe the 'sun of grace'!  I think 'outsing the daylight hours' must also be in part a reference to the canonical hours our medieval poet made the basis for his carol, which makes this a particularly serendipitous discovery.  At the end of Herbert's poem there is a fusion of sound and light: the sun sings, and the poet's music shines.  Sometimes a single word can highlight a thought like a laser-beam, like a shaft of sunlight, and today's word is shine - appearing four times in Herbert's last six lines, and the key word of the carol.  I wonder what it means.

The pictures in this post are from the church of St Mary the Virgin at the tiny village of Lydden, near Dover in Kent. I stopped at the church, unplanned, on the way somewhere else, one winter's day early last January, when the frost-nipped sun of grace was shining in as gladly as one could desire.