People, look East  

The author of this hymn, Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), was born into a highly talented family.  Her father, Benjamin Farjeon, was a popular Victorian author of 60 novels; her elder brother, Harry, was a composer and a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music; her other brothers, Joseph Jefferson and Herbert, were an author of mystery novels and a playwright and theatrical producer.  Farjeon was a prolific writer; she is known as a writer of children’s books, but her many stories, songs and poems interest adults as well.  A Socialist, Farjeon is said to have declined a DBE because she wished “not to become different from the milkman.”  Late in life she became a Roman Catholic.  

 

Besides “People look east,” Farjeon’s best-known piece is the hymn “Morning has broken,” made famous by Cat Stephens, and sometimes misattributed to him. Both of these hymns were commissioned by Percy Dearmer, the first for The Oxford Book of Carols (1928), edited by Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Watkins Shaw, and the second for the second edition of the same men’s Songs of Praise (1931).  Dearmer and Shaw were the Rector and the organist of St Mary’s Church, Primrose Hill, in Hampstead, where Farjeon lived.  For the Oxford Book the editors wanted new words for a French tune possibly from the 17th century which was published in 1842 in Recueil de Noëls anciens au patois de Besançon.   Henry Bramley and John Stainer had used it in Christmas Carols New and Old (1871) to set the anonymous carol “Shepherds, shake off your drowsy sleep.”  Shaw harmonized and arranged the tune for Farjeon's words.  The carol is not in the current version of the Oxford Book of Carols.

 

Farjeon wrote the hymn in five stanzas, but the third is often omitted.  In the Oxford Book of Carols the hymn is called “Carol of The Advent.” (Not “Carol of Advent,” as is often said.)  It is specifically about the coming of the “guest,” who is also called “rose,” “bird,” “star,” and finally, “Lord.”  “Rose” may refer to the biblical Rose of Sharon or to Isaiah’s “the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose,” or to the Advent hymn “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming.”  The star has clear biblical connections to the “star in the East.”  “Bird” is more difficult; there may be an allusion to the dove associated with the Holy Ghost, or possibly to the imagery of Christ as the pelican, piercing its breast to feed its young. The three central stanzas all contrast dark and cold lifelessness with the new life and light brought by the guest who comes from the east.