English narrative folk songs often had large numbers of verses…. If today we don’t have the attention span to deal with them, whose fault is that?

I wasn’t really trying to address the number of verses as a problem in and of itself. Although, I’m not sure our unwillingness to sing all the verses of this song is due to a short attention span. Rather, it may be because the song just simply isn’t very interesting.

In reality, though, I’m more concerned about the content of the song than the number of verses anyway. Thanks for the input.

The third verse of Silent Night, except the first line, is a single complete sentence, which is addressed to “Son of God, . . . , Jesus, Lord,” whose subject is “Love’s pure light,” and whose verb is “beams.” “Radiant” should be set off by commas.

Away in a Manger represents a social ideal, professed mostly in earlier centuries in England but rooted in classical philosophy, in which people looked up to lords who in turn were supposed to embody, among other things, self-control (the famous stiff upper lip) under all circumstances. (Of course, they often didn’t.) So the song is, in a way, about the incarnation of God after all: *this* baby in particular acts like a perfect Lord by not crying when the cattle low (that is, moo very loudly, as they do at night, making a racket that can be heard for miles) right next to him in the stable. Unfortunately, it was often taken as a reproach to the rest of us kids, who would cry.

The First Noel: English narrative folk songs often had large numbers of verses; see Francis James Child’s collection of adult ballads. If today we don’t have the attention span to deal with them, whose fault is that?