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Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 16: NOËL.
By Hilaire Belloc
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Poetry

About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

NOËL.

I.
On a winter’s night long time ago
(The bells ring loud and the bells ring low),
When high howled wind, and down fell snow
(Carillon, Carilla).
Saint Joseph he and Nostre Dame,
Riding on an ass, full weary came
From Nazareth into Bethlehem.
And the small child Jesus smile on you.
II.
And Bethlehem inn they stood before
(The bells ring less and the bells ring more),
The landlord bade them begone from his door
(Carillon, Carilla).
“Poor folk” (says he) “must lie where they may,
For the Duke of Jewry comes this way,
With all his train on a Christmas Day.”
And the small child Jesus smile on you.
III.
Poor folk that may my carol hear
(The bells ring single and the bells ring clear),
See! God’s one Child had hardest cheer!
(Carillon, Carilla).
Men grown hard on a Christmas morn;
The dumb beast by and a babe forlorn.
It was very, very cold when our Lord was born.
And the small child Jesus smile on you.
IV.
Now these were Jews as Jews must be
(The bells ring wild and the bells ring free!),
But Christian men in a band are we
(Carillon, Carilla).
Empty we go and ill bedight,
Singing Noël on a winter’s night;
Give us to sup by the warm firelight.
And the small child Jesus smile on you.