One of the goals I set for myself when I do posts like the 12 days of Christmas posts, is for the songs, or poems I chose to be original-- something which I may not have heard before, and something I am pretty sure you have never heard before. Form most of the Christmas season, this can be reasonably easy, as there is a huge body of Christmas carols throughout the world, just waiting for someone to come poking along and find them. However, some of the individual feasts within the Season are harder to accommodate. The Feast of the Holy Innocents is such a feast. It isn't that there are no songs associated with it, there are. Quite a number, actually. The problem is finding recordings of them. So this year, you are getting and odd little carol about King Herod. It sets the stage for this feast, though it focuses on a miraculous affirmation of the Divinity of Christ, and cuts before Herod infamously orders the massacre of the Holy Innocents.
And, as I came across this poem in my search for a song for today, you are being treated once again to the incomparable Christina Rossetti:
Holy Innocents
Sleep, little Baby, sleep;
The holy Angels love thee,
And guard thy bed, and keep
A blessed watch above thee.
No spirit can come near
Nor evil beast to harm thee:
Sleep, Sweet, devoid of fear
Where nothing need alarm thee.
The Love which doth not sleep,
The eternal Arms surround thee:
The Shepherd of the sheep
In perfect love hath found thee.
Sleep through the holy night,
Christ-kept from snare and sorrow,
Until thou wake to light
And love and warmth to-morrow.
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