One Time, One Meeting

“Can there be fresh speaking and fresh listening right now,” asks the Zen-trained teacher Toni Packer, “undisturbed by what is known?”*

Packer’s question would be pertinent in any season, but it is especially so in the present season, when the usual holiday tunes are in the air, and what we are hearing is so well-known as to seem banal. Like it or not, here comes The Little Drummer Boy again—he and his drum. Given the familiarity of the old songs, is “fresh listening” possible? And if so, how shall we go about it?

As a general rule, Zen teachings would urge us to set aside our social conditioning and merely listen. So what if we’ve heard “Let it Snow” or “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” a thousand times before? Can we not put our preferences in abeyance and listen with “beginner’s mind”? Can we not become a child again?

Perhaps we can, but in my experience such efforts are only intermittently successful. Layers of conditioning block the way. As an alternative, I would suggest in this instance the way of the Western scholar rather than that of the Eastern meditative practitioner. Rather than try to wipe the slate clean, we might make the oft-heard song an object of historical study and disinterested contemplation.

Many possibilities suggest themselves, but one in particular stands out. If you are a parent, you may know the “traditional” carol “Good King Wenceslas” all too well. It is often the first tune assigned to children who are learning to play an instrument.  What is the carol’s provenance, we might inquire, and what is its cultural history? Of what does it consist, musically and thematically?

Published in 1853, “Good King Wenceslas” is at once a Victorian Christmas carol and a retelling of a medieval Czech legend. The carol recounts a good deed done by Wenceslas I (907-935), who was not in fact a king but a duke of Bohemia, noted for giving alms to widows, orphans, prisoners, and the poor. In 935 Wenceslas was assassinated on orders from his brother. Shortly thereafter, he was declared a saint and martyr, and the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I conferred on him the “regal dignity and title.” Today King Wenceslas is the patron saint of the Czech Republic.

In the manner of a ballad, “Good King Wenceslas” depicts the king regaling himself on the feast of St. Stephen’s Day (December 26). Turning aside from the festivities, he observes a peasant gathering fuel in the bitter cold. This sight prompts the king to summon a page and to depart with meat, wine, and pine logs to the peasant’s forest home. Along the way, the page complains of the cold, and the king instructs him to follow in his regal footsteps though the snow. Warmed by the sainted king’s steps, the page completes the journey, and the compassionate errand is accomplished.

The lyrics of “Good King Wenceslas” were written by John Mason Neale (1816-1866), clergyman, hymnist, and warden of an English alms-house. An amalgam of narrative, dramatic, and didactic elements, Neale’s text features a brief dialogue between the querulous page and the generous king, and it ends with a simple homily, in which Christian men are exhorted to share their wealth and thereby “find blessing” for themselves.

Given its content, “Good King Wenceslas” might have been set to a solemn tune. As it happened, however, Neale and his collaborator, Thomas Helmore, chose a thirteenth-century spring carol entitled “Tempest adest floridum” (“It is time for flowering”). In its original version, this lively Swedish carol portrayed lusty clerics disporting with local virgins. A later version, modified for churches and schools, portrayed the clerics praising the Lord with pious conviction.

In keeping with its mixed origins, the spirit of “Good King Wenceslas” is both energetic and restrained, dancelike and ceremonial. The carol’s energy derives chiefly from its underlying rhythm, which consists of units of two syllables, the stress falling on the first. Known to prosodists as trochaic, this aggressive rhythm can be heard in the opening line:

GOOD King / WEN-ces- / LAS looked / OUT

At the same time, all of the verses end on stressed syllables, with two such syllables in every other line:

WHEN  the / SNOW lay / ROUND a- / BOUT

DEEP and / CRISP and / E- / VEN

Sung as half-notes, the terminal syllables impart a stately feeling. Together with the trochaic rhythm, this recurrent pattern creates a pleasing tension between exuberant celebration and regal restraint.

To be sure, not everyone has found the union of moral fable and virile carol a happy one. The composer Elizabeth Poston, editor of The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, dismisses “Good King Wenceslas” as “the product of an unnatural marriage between Victorian whimsy and the thirteenth-century dance carol.” The dance measure of the original, she contends, “sounds ridiculous to pseudo-religious words.”**