Shall I Compare You to a Christmas Carol? asks Griselda Heppel

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Happy New Year! 

And now that Christmas is over, I’m going to try something. 

 Here are a few lines from some of the top famous poems of all time (according to Google):

 1. Shall I compare you to a summer’s day? 
     You are lovelier and more temperate. (Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare) 

 
Autumn foliage
2. Season of mists and yellow fruitfulness,
     Close friend of the maturing sun. (Ode to Autumn, John Keats) 

 3. I must go back to the seas again, to the lowly seas and the sky 
     And all I ask is a good ship, and a star to sail her by. (Sea Fever, John Masefield) 

 4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 
    That sails on high over dales and hills (Daffodils, William Wordsworth) 

Notice anything? 

 Lovers of literature will be foaming at the mouth long before they reach No 4 (judging by myself, naturally). 

Because these lines are full of errors.* Small errors, arising from carelessness, perhaps: a wrong word here or there, nothing serious, surely. Nothing to prevent recognition of both poem and poet, so where’s the problem? 
Wandering lonely as a cloud. Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-field-and-blue-sky-46160/

Well I hope the problem is that anyone wanting to read, learn, analyse and enjoy exactly what the writer wrote would care very much that errors like these should not creep in. Which as far as I know they haven’t – yet. But I have just spent the last month in close proximity to a number of much loved poems that have been mangled, some in a minor way, others almost beyond recognition, by an organisation that ought to know better. 

I’m looking at you, Church of England. What you’ve done to the beautiful Advent and Christmas carols of Charles Oakley, C F Alexander, J M Neale and others is outrageous. Deciding that parts of these poems are too archaic, you’ve rewritten them in a way that replaces the poet’s original fine imagery with utmost blandness. Hills of the North, Rejoice, for instance, has lost all its evocative, if naïve, depictions of God’s beautiful earth to a string of unmemorable cliches, as in verse 3: 

Deep in your coral caves. Photo by Sam N: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ vibrant-coral-reef-with-colorful-fish-in-aquarium-35365412/

Original by Charles Oakley (1832 – 1865): 

Isles of the southern seas, 
Deep in your coral caves 
Pent be each warring breeze, 
Lulled be your restless waves: 

Updated version:

Isles of the Southern seas, 
sing to the listening earth, 
carry on every breeze 
hope of a world's new birth: 

While I mourn the lack of poetic imagination in this rewritten verse, I can understand the Church's feeling that the19th century, west-centric world view of Hills of the North needed addressing. 

Less forgivable is the messing around with the beautifully structured Once in Royal David’s City. No one has trouble understanding Cecil Frances Alexander’s timeless depiction of Christ’s birth and childhood, and its message for adults and children alike. Yet I’ve seen it truncated, with the last two lines of verse 4 overwriting those of verse 3, wrecking the meaning of the preceding lines. And in one recent carol service I found myself ending the whole carol, not with:
Memorial window to C F Alexander in
St Columb's Cathedral, Derry, N.I.
Photo by Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45912122

Where like stars his children crowned 
All in white shall wait around. 

But with:

There his children gather round 
Bright like stars, with glory crowned. 

Why? What was wrong with Mrs Alexander’s original lines? And what gives a member of the clergy who doesn’t happen to like them, the right to impose his/her own doggerel instead? 

Worst of all, these ‘little errors’ here and there are never owned up to. The name of the original poet is recorded next to the hymn, as if all the ‘improvements’ were Mrs Alexander’s/Charles Oakley’s own work. It’s like poor A A Milne being lumbered with the authorship of all the ghastly bogus Winnie-the-Pooh sentiment running riot across the internet. 

Hence my tinkering with the famous lines quoted at the beginning of this piece. No one would accept my cheeky changes. So why is it OK to redraft the words of hymns and carols to suit contemporary ideas, with no acknowledgement that this has been done? 

Next year I won’t bother with any hymn sheets. Much easier to sing the carols without them.


*Correct versions: 

1. Shall I compare THEE to a summer’s day? 
 THOU art MORE LOVELY and more temperate 
2. Seasons of mists and MELLOW fruitfulness, 
  Close BOSOM-friend of the maturing sun 
3. I must go DOWN to the seas again, to the LONELY sea and the sky, 
   And all I ask is a TALL ship, and a star to STEER her by. 
4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 
   That FLOATS on high O’ER VALES and hills


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