Poetry Corner: Ralph Blane

Maybe I should stop calling this Poetry Corner and start calling it Song Lyrics Corner …

This year has not been a good one for our family. Some of the setbacks have been covered on this blog, such as the burglary just before Thanksgiving (I just realized that one of the DVDs the burglars stole was How the Grinch Stole Christmas; how's that for irony?). Other disasters have been of a nature not suitable to share here. Suffice it to say we have had annus horribilis, but without the public scrutiny that Buckingham Palace has to endure.

So my iTunes played Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," from the 1944 movie Meet Me In St. Louis. It's not just the song itself; it's the way she sings it, with a sort of pleading, desperate hope that next year will be better. "We'll have to muddle through somehow." When Frank Sinatra later recorded the song, he changed that line to something more optimistic, and that became the words everybody knows. But Garland just seemed to be singing to me directly, and her words and her delivery are all the more meaningful.

It was hard to find the original (as Garland sang them) lyrics online … I finally found them at sing365.com. Actually, these aren't the true original lyrics; the song was written the year before for soldiers fighting in World War II, and those lyrics had a reference to maybe not even living until next year. Garland insisted on changing that line for the movie. She was, after all, singing comforting words to a distressed 7-year-old.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Ralph Blane

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be
out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the yule-tide gay
Next year all our troubles will be
miles away
Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who were dear to us
Will be near to us once more
Someday soon, we all will be together
If the Fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.