Wordwatch: Hark

“Hark the Herald Angels sing” is a familiar enough phrase, especially at this time of the year. The poem, which we sing as a popular carol, is by the prolific hymn-writer Charles Wesley (brother of John, founder of Methodism). Its famous tune, in case you’re wondering, comes from a chorus by Felix Mendelssohn.

Familiar though it is, I’ve noticed recently a certain amount of confusion about the word “hark”. We know it means “listen”, and there’s a connection with the simple verb “to hear”, but with perhaps a suggestion of urgency, of insistence about it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as a definition “to hear with active attention”, and that, surely, is the least we ought to accord the seraphs in Heaven.  

One context in which the word “hark” crops up is the historical one of fox-hunting, and several phrases connected with the hunting field have survived in colloquial expressions still in use today: “to hark back” and “hark forward” or “hark away”. In these phrases it bears the additional sense of “to go” and the urgency in the word is felt quite strongly. “To hark back” in particular has acquired additional layers of sense and come to mean “to return (often in thought) to the past, to something experienced earlier”.

And there’s another form of the word: “to hearken”, for which the dictionary gives a similar meaning, though suggesting that it often implied secrecy or eavesdropping. It’s somewhat archaic, and the dictionary lists it as “poetic”. I would say that it’s obsolescent, hardly ever used except in poetry and a few idiomatic contexts. In America, it is spelled “harken” and there has perhaps inevitably developed some confusion, from which the expression “to hearken back” has emerged as a common but mistaken formulation: “…each day the Brahmpur Chronicle had found some occasion to hearken back to the Raja of Marh’s unseemly exit” (Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy, 1993). Here’s an even earlier example: “Country music’s staple, above all, is nostalgia. Just a hearkening back to the old way of life, either real or imagined.”(Bill Malone, Country Music USA, 1968).

So maybe we should listen with greater attention to the injunction to hear what the herald angels are saying, and with a sharpened sense of the importance of their message. Certainly, whatever your religious views, the message of “Peace on Earth, goodwill to Men” is as relevant, if not as urgent, as it ever has been.

Happy Christmas, and may your New Year be peaceful and prosperous!