Music Reviews

Hark How All The Welkin Rings

by RikCharbonneaux. To Your Health  
12/19/24
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I enjoy hearing the hymn “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and was once told by our music director that Charles Wesley had originally written an entirely different first verse: “Hark how all the welkin rings”.

Now that I have time (retired) to reflect on such things, I looked into the meaning of this first verse of the original hymn.

“Welkin” is from the old English of Wesley’s day and means “cloud” and its meaning in the original hymn is “a great noise from the clouds”.   Easy enough to see why “Hark the herald angels sing” took its place as the first verse when the hymn was re-written.

Delving a little further into hymnology and that period, the term “Welkin” was used somewhat exclusively to describe the great noise of the hounds and hunters heard in the fox hunt when the fox has gone to ground before the hounds.  

Charles Wesley liked to borrow from existing poetry, and he did so from a poem by William Somerville about fox hunting, called “The Chase” (1735) which contained the verse “The welkin rings, Men, Dogs, Hills, Rock, and Wood, all In the full consort join.”

It makes sense that Charles Westley would use the word  “welkin”  as the Herald Angles would have made an even louder and much more resounding noise of praise and announcement.

And thus, Wesley penned “Hark how all the Welkin rings / Glory to the King of Kings” as the original first verse of the hymn in 1739, to be changed by Wesley in 1753 to “Hark! the Herald Angels sing / Glory to the new-born King!”

I enjoyed what I learned about this hymn, and it just adds to it being my favorite. I hope that some of you enjoyed hearing about “the Welkin” too.