On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity

By John Milton

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is a Christmas ode by John Milton, written in December 1629, when he was 21 and still at Christ’s College, Cambridge. It was first printed as the opening poem of Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin (Humphrey Moseley, 1645).

Across 244 lines, divided into a four-stanza prelude and a 27-stanza hymn, it pictures nature, the heavens, and the pagan gods all responding to the birth of Christ, and it is often called Milton’s first great poem.

Our reading is that the ode is less about the manger than about sound and silence. The baby barely moves, and the real action is what falls quiet around him: the weapons of war, the winds, the oracles, and finally the old gods, who flee one by one. Milton, who had just come of age and was planning a life as a poet, writes a poem in which a new song replaces the old ones, and he quietly casts himself as its singer.

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Summary · The Poem · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
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Summary

The poem opens with a prelude. This is the month and the morning of Christ’s birth, the speaker says, the day when the Son of God gave up his glory in heaven and chose “a darksome house of mortal clay.”

He then asks his Muse for a gift for the infant. He urges her to hurry, so that his hymn reaches the manger before the Magi, who are already on the road.

The Hymn begins in midwinter. Nature, ashamed before her Maker, hides under a covering of snow, and Peace descends to quiet the world. Wars stop, the winds and the sea fall calm, the stars stand still, and even the sun holds back, knowing that a greater light has come.

Shepherds chatting in a field hear music so sweet that Nature thinks her work is done. A globe of light appears, filled with angels, and the speaker calls on the music of the spheres to join their song. If such music lasted, he says, the golden age would return, and sin and Hell would melt away.

But Fate says no. The child must first die on the cross, and the world must wait for the Last Judgment. Even so, the power of the old Dragon, Satan, begins to shrink from this day on.

The last third of the Hymn is a roll call of fleeing gods. The oracle of Apollo falls silent, the nymphs mourn, and the gods of Canaan, Phoenicia, and Egypt desert their temples. Like shadows at sunrise, they slip away, and the poem ends quietly in the stable, where the Virgin has laid her baby to rest and angels sit in ranks around him.

The Poem

The text below follows the 1910 edition designed and hand-lettered by Ralph Fletcher Seymour (Chicago: Reilly & Britton), as transcribed by Project Gutenberg (eBook #78259). Its spelling is modernized, and it follows Milton’s revised text of 1673, which rewrote stanza XV of the Hymn.

We have left out the stanza numbers. Line numbers on this page count the induction as lines 1 to 28 and the Hymn as lines 29 to 244, the usual scholarly numbering. One small difference from the early printings: this edition reads “full redemption” in line 4, where both the 1645 and 1673 texts have “great redemption.”

This is the month and this the happy morn,
Wherein the son of heaven’s eternal king,
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Our full redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
  That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heaven’s high council-table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
  Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now, while the heaven, by the sun’s team untrod,
  Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?

See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet;
Oh! run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
  And join thy voice unto the angel choir,
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.

The Hymn

It was the winter wild,
While the Heaven-born child
      All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
      With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the sun, her lusty paramour.

Only, with speeches fair
She wooes the gentle air
      To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,
And on her naked shame,
Pollute with sinful blame,
      The saintly veil of maiden white to throw;
Confounded that her Maker’s eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities.

But he, her fears to cease,
Sent down the meek-eyed Peace;
      She, crowned with olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphere,
His ready harbinger,
      With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing;
And, waving wide her myrtle wand,
She strikes an universal peace through sea and land.

No war, or battle’s sound,
Was heard the world around;
      The idle spear and shield were high up hung;
The hookèd chariot stood,
Unstained with hostile blood;
      The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;
And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
      His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,
      Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave.

The stars, with deep amaze,
Stand fixed in steadfast gaze,
      Bending one way their precious influence,
And will not take their flight
For all the morning light,
      Or Lucifer that often warned them thence;
But in their glimmering orbs did glow,
Until their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.

And, though the shady gloom
Had given day her room,
      The sun himself withheld his wonted speed,
And hid his head for shame,
As his inferior flame
      The new enlightened world no more should need;
He saw a greater Sun appear
Than his bright throne or burning axle-tree could bear.

The shepherds on the lawn,
Or ere the point of dawn,
      Sat simply chatting in a rustic row;
Full little thought they then,
That the mighty Pan
      Was kindly come to live with them below;
Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,
Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

When such music sweet
Their hearts and ears did greet,
      As never was by mortal finger strook,
Divinely-warbled voice
Answering the stringèd noise,
      As all their souls in blissful rapture took;
The air, such pleasure loth to lose,
With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

Nature, that heard such sound,
Beneath the hollow round
      Of Cynthia’s seat, the airy region thrilling,
Now was almost won
To think her part was done,
      And that her reign had here its last fulfilling;
She knew such harmony alone
Could hold all Heaven and Earth in happier union.

At last surrounds their sight
A globe of circular light,
      That with long beams the shame-faced Night arrayed;
The helmèd Cherubim,
And sworded Seraphim,
      Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed,
Harping in loud and solemn choir,
With unexpressive notes, to Heaven’s new-born Heir.

Such music (as ’tis said)
Before was never made,
      But when of old the Sons of Morning sung,
While the Creator great
His constellations set,
      And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

Ring out, ye crystal Spheres!
Once bless our human ears
      (If ye have power to touch our senses so),
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
      And let the base of Heaven’s deep organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.

For if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,
      Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled Vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
      And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mold;
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering Day.

Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
      Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
      With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
And Heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

But wisest Fate says No,
This must not yet be so,
      The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss,
      So both himself and us to glorify;
Yet first, to those ychained in sleep,
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,

With such a horrid clang
As on Mount Sinai rang,
      While the red fire and smouldering clouds outbrake;
The agèd Earth aghast,
With terror of that blast,
      Shall from the surface to the center shake;
When at the world’s last session,
The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.

And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
      But now begins; for from this happy day
The old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
      Not half so far casts his usurpèd sway,
And, wroth to see his kingdom fail,
Swindges the scaly horror of his folded tail.

The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
      Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
      With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o’er
And the resounding shore,
      A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edged with poplar pale,
      The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
      The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns, and altars round,
A drear and dying sound
      Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar Power forgoes his wonted seat.

Peor and Baälim
Forsake their temples dim,
      With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
And moonèd Ashtaroth,
Heaven’s queen and mother both,
      Now sits not girt with taper’s holy shine;
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.

And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
      His burning idol all of blackest hue;
In vain, with cymbals’ ring,
They call the grisly king,
      In dismal dance about the furnace blue;
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.

Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
      Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
      Nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud!
In vain with timbreled anthems dark
The sable-stolèd sorcerers bear his worshipped ark.

He feels from Judah’s land
The dreaded infant’s hand,
      The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
      Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine,
Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in His swaddling bands control the damnèd crew.

So when the sun in bed,
Curtained with cloudy red,
      Pillows his chin upon an orient wave,
The flocking shadows pale
Troop to the infernal jail,
      Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave;
And the yellow-skirted fays
Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze.

But see, the Virgin blest
Hath laid her Babe to rest;
      Time is our tedious song should here have ending;
Heaven’s youngest-teemèd star
Hath fixed her polished car,
      Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending;
And all about the courtly stable
Bright-harnessed angels sit in order serviceable.

Background

John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608. His father was a scrivener, a kind of notary and moneylender, and also an amateur composer. Milton entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1625 and took his BA in 1629, staying on for his MA, which he received in 1632.

The ode belongs to the weeks just after his 21st birthday. When it was printed in 1645, it carried the heading “Compos’d 1629,” one of the few places where Milton gave a date of composition.

A Latin poem fixes the occasion more closely. In his Sixth Elegy, a verse letter to his close friend Charles Diodati written that December, Milton describes a poem he has made as a birthday gift for Christ, and he says the strains came to him at first light.

Scholars generally take this to be the Nativity Ode, which is why it is often said to have been begun on Christmas morning.

Sixteen years passed before it appeared in print. By the time Moseley published Poems of Mr. John Milton in 1645, Milton was known mainly as a writer of prose pamphlets on church government and divorce. He chose to open the book with the ode, and the scholar Thomas N. Corns has suggested that its first place probably reflects Milton’s own sense of its quality.

In the 1645 volume, the ode is followed by “The Passion,” a companion piece on the Crucifixion that Milton left unfinished. A note explains that he found the subject “above the yeers he had” when he wrote it.

Milton revised the ode for the second edition of his shorter poems, Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673), published the year before his death. The main change came in stanza XV, where the 1645 picture of Truth and Justice wearing “th’enameld arras of the rain-bow” became the version printed here.

Analysis and Themes

The ode moves from a quiet stable to the whole cosmos and back again. Four ideas shape that movement: the poet’s own ambition, the hush of nature, the music of heaven, and the defeat of the old gods.

The Poet Races the Magi

The induction is as much about Milton as about Christ. The speaker asks his “heavenly Muse” for a gift and then tells her to run and “prevent” the wise men, an old word meaning to arrive before them. The humble ode is meant to be the first present laid at the infant’s feet.

Some readers, including the Yale scholar John Rogers, hear the modern sense of “prevent” as well, as if the young poet wanted to head off the Magi altogether. Either way, the stanza shows a 21-year-old announcing his calling. Its final image, a voice touched with fire from a secret altar, recalls the prophet Isaiah, whose lips an angel touched with a live coal.

Nature Falls Silent

The Hymn begins not with the child but with Nature, who is ashamed of her “foul deformities” and covers them with snow. Winter here is a moral image as well as a season: the fallen world hides its guilt before the one who has come to redeem it.

Then comes a long hush. Peace strikes “an universal peace through sea and land,” the spears hang idle, the winds are “whist,” and the stars refuse to move. Even the sun holds back, ashamed beside “a greater Sun.”

The idea that the world lay at peace when Christ was born was an old one, linked to the peace of the Roman emperor Augustus. Milton turns it into a scene of the whole creation waiting, so that the Incarnation is felt by everything, not only by the people in Bethlehem.

The Music of the Spheres

Sound is the center of the poem. The shepherds hear music “as never was by mortal finger strook,” and Milton compares it to the song of the “Sons of Morning” at the creation, echoing the Book of Job, where the morning stars sing together. Christ’s birth becomes a second creation.

In stanza XIII, the speaker calls on the “crystal Spheres” to ring out. This draws on the ancient idea that the turning heavens make a music too fine for fallen human ears. If people could hear it, he says, “Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,” and for a moment the poem imagines paradise restored.

The Flight of the Old Gods

Stanza XVI breaks the spell: “wisest Fate says No.” The child must suffer the cross first, and the end of time is still to come. From this point on, the poem turns from heavenly music to its opposite, the silencing of false voices.

Milton draws on an old Christian tradition that the pagan oracles fell silent at Christ’s coming, a belief that grew in part from Plutarch’s essay on why the oracles had stopped speaking. Apollo leaves Delphi with a “hollow shriek,” and then the gods of Israel’s neighbors go one by one: Peor and Baalim, Ashtaroth, Moloch, and the animal-headed gods of Egypt.

The catalog is learned and strangely sad. Nymphs weep in the thickets, and household spirits moan at their hearths. Milton lets the reader feel the loss even as he celebrates it, and many of the same names return in Book I of Paradise Lost (1667), where they appear as fallen angels.

Form and Technique

The ode has two parts, each with its own stanza. The four stanzas of the induction have seven lines, rhymed ABABBCC: six lines of iambic pentameter and a final hexameter, or alexandrine. It is a version of rhyme royal, the stanza of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, stretched at the close much as Spenser ends his stanza with a long line.

The Hymn uses a stanza Milton appears to have devised himself. Its eight lines rhyme AABCCBDD and keep changing length: two short trimeter lines, a pentameter, two more trimeters, another pentameter, a tetrameter, and a long closing alexandrine. You can hear it in the first stanza, which steps from “it WAS the WIN-ter WILD” to the long, slow “to WAN-ton WITH the SUN, her LUS-ty PAR-a-MOUR.”

The shape suits the subject. Each stanza starts small, like the child, and swells to a full line, so the form keeps acting out the poem’s movement from the manger to the cosmos. The text on this page indents the two pentameter lines in each stanza of the Hymn to show the pattern.

Milton also leans hard on sound. In line 191, “The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,” the repeated m sounds make the line moan, and the long lists of exotic names slow the verse during the flight of the gods. Old forms such as “ychained” (line 155) and “eyn” (line 223) give the poem a deliberately antique, Spenserian flavor.

Notable Lines

Four passages show the range of the ode, from the stable to the end of the pagan world.

It was the winter wild,
While the Heaven-born child
All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;

Lines 29 to 31

The Hymn opens with its most famous line. Two short phrases set the scene, and the long third line brings the eye down to the manger. “Meanly” here means humbly, not unkindly.

Ring out, ye crystal Spheres!
Once bless our human ears
(If ye have power to touch our senses so),

Lines 125 to 127

The appeal to the music of the spheres is the hinge of the Hymn. The parenthesis admits a doubt, since fallen ears may not be able to hear such music, and that doubt makes the hope more moving.

The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Lines 173 to 175

This stanza begins the poem’s last movement. The short, flat statement “The oracles are dumb” sounds like an announcement, and the lines that follow catch the eerie hum of a temple that has gone silent.

But see, the Virgin blest
Hath laid her Babe to rest;
Time is our tedious song should here have ending;

Lines 237 to 239

After all the cosmic drama, the poem ends in the stable. The speaker calls his own song “tedious,” meaning long, a modest touch after more than 200 lines, and he stops because the baby is asleep.

Themes

Five ideas run through the ode, and most of them meet in the image of the sleeping child.

The Incarnation

The poem is built on the paradox of God becoming a child. The “glorious form” of heaven is laid aside for “a darksome house of mortal clay,” and the one who will judge the world lies in swaddling bands. Milton keeps the cradle and the cross in view together.

Peace

The birth brings a universal stillness, from the hung-up spears to the calm sea. Peace is pictured as a messenger with a turtledove’s wing and a myrtle wand, and the poem presents her as a first sign of what Christ’s reign will mean.

Music and Harmony

Heavenly music is the poem’s image of a restored world. The angels’ song and the music of the spheres stand for a harmony between heaven and earth that sin broke and that Christ begins to mend.

Christ’s Victory Over the Pagan Gods

The flight of the oracles and idols shows Christ’s power from his very first day. Even “in His swaddling bands,” the infant controls “the damnèd crew,” so the Nativity is already a victory.

Poetic Vocation

The ode is also a young poet’s declaration. By offering his hymn as a gift and racing to deliver it first, Milton presents himself as a poet set apart for sacred subjects, a calling he would fulfill decades later in Paradise Lost.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”.

When Did Milton Write “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”?

In December 1629, soon after his 21st birthday on December 9. The 1645 printing is headed “Compos’d 1629,” and in his Latin Sixth Elegy, written to his friend Charles Diodati that month, Milton mentions a poem for Christ’s birthday that came to him at first light. The ode was first published in 1645.

What Is the Structure of the Nativity Ode?

The poem has two parts. A prelude of four seven-line stanzas introduces the occasion, and “The Hymn” follows in 27 eight-line stanzas, for a total of 244 lines. The Hymn’s stanza mixes short and long lines and ends each time on a 12-syllable alexandrine.

Why Do the Pagan Gods Flee in the Poem?

Milton draws on an old Christian tradition that the pagan oracles fell silent when Christ was born. In stanzas XIX to XXV of the Hymn, Apollo, the gods of Canaan and Phoenicia, and the gods of Egypt all abandon their shrines, showing that the infant has already begun to defeat the powers of evil.

What Does “Prevent” Mean in the Poem?

In line 24, “prevent” has its older meaning, “to come before.” The speaker urges his Muse to hurry so that his ode reaches the infant before the Magi, the “star-led wizards” of line 23, can arrive with their gifts. Some readers also hear the modern sense of stopping them.

Who Is Pan in the Nativity Ode?

In line 89, the shepherds do not know “that the mighty Pan / Was kindly come to live with them below.” Pan, the Greek god of shepherds, stands for Christ here, an identification found in earlier Renaissance pastoral poetry, including Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The name also suits Christ as the Good Shepherd.

Glossary

Milton’s vocabulary mixes old English words with names from classical and biblical myth. These are the ones most likely to stop a modern reader.

• Trinal Unity (line 11): The Trinity, God as three persons in one.
• wizards (line 23): Wise men; here, the Magi.
• prevent (line 24): Come before or anticipate.
• doffed her gaudy trim (line 33): Took off her bright finery; Nature has lost her summer colors.
• harbinger (line 49): A messenger sent ahead to announce someone’s coming.
• turtle wing (line 50): The wing of a turtledove, a symbol of peace and love.
• whist (line 64): Hushed or silent.
• Lucifer (line 74): The morning star, the planet Venus, not Satan.
• axle-tree (line 84): The axle of the sun’s chariot in classical myth.
• Pan (line 89): The Greek god of shepherds, used here for Christ.
• silly (line 92): Simple or innocent, not foolish.
• unexpressive (line 116): Inexpressible, beyond words.
• ychained (line 155): Chained; the y- prefix is an old form that Spenser liked.
• Swindges (line 172): Swings or lashes.
• Delphos (line 178): Delphi, the site of Apollo’s oracle.
• Lars and Lemures (line 191): Roman household gods and the restless spirits of the dead.
• Flamens (line 194): Roman priests, each serving a single god.
• Ashtaroth (line 200): Astarte, a Phoenician goddess linked with the moon.
• Thammuz (line 204): Tammuz, a god whose yearly death was mourned by women.
• Moloch (line 205): A Canaanite god associated in the Bible with child sacrifice.
• eyn (line 223): Eyes.
• fays (line 235): Fairies.

In Popular Culture

The ode has drawn artists and composers for centuries. William Blake painted two sets of six watercolor illustrations for it, one for his patron Thomas Butts and one, probably in 1809, for the Rev. Joseph Thomas. The Butts set is now at the Huntington Library in California, and the Thomas set is at the Whitworth in Manchester.

Cyril Rootham’s setting of the complete poem for soloists, chorus, and orchestra was published in 1929. Ralph Vaughan Williams set part of the Hymn in his Christmas cantata Hodie (1954), in the soprano song “It was the winter wild,” and John Blackwood McEwen and Stephen Paulus have also set portions of it.

Related Poems

If the Nativity Ode speaks to you, these poems share its season, its subject, or its blend of faith and learning.

• The Oxen by Thomas Hardy: A modern Christmas poem in which the animals of the stable share in the wonder of the birth, seen through the eyes of a doubter.
• Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot: A modern view of the wise men whom Milton’s speaker races to the manger.
• The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell: An Elizabethan Christmas poem that, like Milton’s ode, sees the cross already present in the child.
• Love Came Down at Christmas by Christina Rossetti: A short Victorian carol on the same subject, as simple as Milton’s ode is grand.
• Lycidas by John Milton: Milton’s pastoral elegy of 1637, which shares the ode’s learned mix of classical myth and Christian faith.