[18] 117 See Amid The Winter’s Snow

‘See, amid the winter’s snow,
Born for us on earth below,
See, the lamb of God appears,
Promised from eternal years!
---Hail, thou ever-blessèd morn!
---Hail, redemption’s happy dawn!
---Sing through all Jerusalem:
---Christ is born in Bethlehem!’

So hopefully in my last blog you realised I’ve been somewhat poetically connecting snow with sin. Didn’t catch that? You might want to re-read it… Must admit; I indulged in a flight of fancy last night. Perhaps now we can have a look at the same idea in a different way.

I really like the analogy of sin as snow. I’m not the first to equate the two: I’m sure C S Lewis had this in mind when he created Narnia for his allegorical Chronicles. In ‘The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe’ the land of Narnia has been plunged into perpetual winter by the White Witch (representing the Devil), which is thawed only by Aslan (representing Christ). Perhaps ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ (blog number 5) could allude to this: ‘snow on snow’ is repeated, making four uses of the word ‘snow’ in that one line. That repetition cannot be accidental. Perhaps there is sadness in the repetition, or perhaps Rosetti was trying to point out that this idea is really important. Either way, the words indicate that ‘snow’ is referring to something more than frozen precipitation; I’d suggest sin.

That approach could be true for this carol, too. It’s strengthened here by direct reference in line 6 to ‘redemption’ – as if the ‘happy dawn’ of redemption is the opposite of the ‘winter’s snow’. Dawn removes snow. Redemption removes sin. Dawn is to snow what redemption is to sin. Therefore snow is sin. OK so it doesn’t exactly make any logical sense – I’m not the world’s greatest logician. It’s not philosophy; it’s poetry.

No decent writer leaves throw-away lines in their work. Especially in a religious work, every idea carries meaning. Read the first half of this verse again. Think about every single idea it presents. Think about why the word ‘see’ is repeated; about the connection between ‘us’ and ‘earth’ and ‘below’ in the 2nd line; about how it’s all one sentence, but the main subject and predicate only come in the 3rd line. Think about one-syllable clauses, such as ‘see’, ‘hail’, and in later verses ‘say’ and ‘lo’. These make it seem conversational (for a 19th Century hymn-writer), and rather dynamically they draw us in, give us commands, show us what to look at. This carol uses every opportunity to tell us something, and to tell us that it is telling us something!

Back to sinful snow. This carol does not leave snow as an isolated idea; it describes it as being of winter. Christmas comes at the season most likely to suffer snow; the coldest time with the longest nights. That could imply the traditional Advent message of ‘don’t get carried away by over-doing the material stuff, there’s a lot of sin at Christmas!’, but I think you’ll probably have heard that a million times before. How about instead that even now there is snow on the ground. Every year before Christ’s birth there was snowfall, and every year since, and there will be every year from now on. In this world at least, snow doesn’t just go. We may not be suffering an eternal Narnian winter, but there’s certainly a fresh layer of white stuff on the Pennines tonight. Perhaps this is why Christmas keeps happening. Snow keeps falling.