No Trees, Please! Brooklyn Residents Say Plantings Will Harm Their Homes’ Feng Shui
By JENNIFER DOHERTY
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A poem whose strangeness breaks through the over-listened carols of the season to bring alive again the deep metaphysical mystery at the center of Christianity.
What more could one want for the holiday season than a Christmas ballad with roots in the 15th century? The lyrics of “Down in Yon Forest” exist in dozens of versions, a complicated and probably unsortable manuscript tradition of mixed Middle English and Modern English: “The bells of Paradise I heard them ring.”
The song dwells in the same world of symbols as the better-known “Corpus Christi Carol,” which first appeared in written form in 1504, and “Down in Yon Forest” probably originated as a sanding down of that carol. But “Down in Yon Forest” has a compelling simplicity that makes the song its own entity — and a strangeness that breaks through the over-listened carols of the season to bring alive again the deep metaphysical mystery at the center of Christianity.
Lovely versions of the song of can be found easily, and what makes them work is the attention they pay to the odd driving force of the verses. Without actually being a narrative, “Down in Yon Forest” moves as though it had a narrative. Its series of images — a hall, a bed, a stone, a flood, a thorn — create the sense of motion toward a goal: the birth of Christ shown as the moment that salvation entered the world.
By JENNIFER DOHERTY
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By ALEX J. POLLOCK
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By NEWT GINGRICH
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By CARL ROLLYSON
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
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By BENNY AVNI
|What more could one want for the holiday season than a Christmas ballad with roots in the 15th century? The lyrics of “Down in Yon Forest” exist in dozens of versions, a complicated and probably unsortable manuscript tradition of mixed Middle English and Modern English: “The bells of Paradise I heard them ring.”
The song dwells in the same world of symbols as the better-known “Corpus Christi Carol,” which first appeared in written form in 1504, and “Down in Yon Forest” probably originated as a sanding down of that carol. But “Down in Yon Forest” has a compelling simplicity that makes the song its own entity — and a strangeness that breaks through the over-listened carols of the season to bring alive again the deep metaphysical mystery at the center of Christianity.
Lovely versions of the song of can be found easily, and what makes them work is the attention they pay to the odd driving force of the verses. Without actually being a narrative, “Down in Yon Forest” moves as though it had a narrative. Its series of images — a hall, a bed, a stone, a flood, a thorn — create the sense of motion toward a goal: the birth of Christ shown as the moment that salvation entered the world.
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