Cradle Hymn: A Song History

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Isaac Watts's poem "A Cradle Hymn" is the earliest work of this name among the sources consulted here.[1] Watts's Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children was first published in 1715.[2] Sources differ on when the hymn itself was first printed: De Montfort University's Hockliffe Project says Watts added it to the book after the first edition,[3] while a New Oxford Book of Carols note quoted by Mainly Norfolk dates its first publication to 1706.[4] A 1777 edition of Divine Songs places the hymn after the children's songs, with a brief note saying the author agreed to publish it because copies were already circulating.[1]

Painting of a seated woman holding a cord, against green wallpaper with pink flowers

Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930), oil on canvas, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the hymn.

Watts's words have been sung to several melodies.[4][5] Hymnary.org lists a D-minor tune named CRADLE HYMN, taken from Harmonia Sacra (1753), as the setting of his text at no. 242 in the Episcopal Church's 1940 hymnal.[5] The 1896 Sunday-school book Children's Praises paired the text with a tune credited to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,[6] and Hymnary.org also links it with GREENVILLE, an air from Rousseau's 1752 opera Le Devin du village.[7][8] The carol-book note quoted by Mainly Norfolk credits Elizabeth Poston with finally giving the poem a worthy melody, a widely sung shape-note tune, in The Second Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (1970); the site dates that tune to the early nineteenth-century United States.[4] Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band recorded the hymn on Carols and Capers (1991).[4]

The name was also attached to "Away in a Manger": James R. Murray's Dainty Songs for Little Lads and Lasses (1887), where the carol's tune AWAY IN A MANGER was first published, labeled the song "Luther's Cradle Hymn," and the carol was wrongly credited to Martin Luther for many years afterward.[9] Samuel Taylor Coleridge's English version of the Latin "Dormi Jesus! Mater ridet" appears as "The Virgin's Cradle Hymn" in The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).[10]

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Sources

  1. Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive: "A Cradle Hymn" (Isaac Watts).
  2. Project Gutenberg: "The Divine and Moral Songs of Isaac Watts" (Wilbur Macey Stone, 1918).
  3. The Hockliffe Project, De Montfort University: "Divine songs, attempted in easy language for children".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Watts's Cradle Hymn / Dunstan Lullaby".
  5. Hymnary.org: "CRADLE HYMN" (tune).
  6. Hymnary.org: "Hush, My Dear," Children's Praises (1896) #47.
  7. Hymnary.org: "Hush, My Dear" (text).
  8. Hymnary.org: "GREENVILLE (Rousseau)" (tune).
  9. Hymnary.org / Psalter Hymnal Handbook: "Away in a Manger" (Psalter Hymnal 348).
  10. Hymnary.org: "Sleep, Sweet Babe! (The Virgin's Lullaby or (Cradle Hymn))".