Away, dark thoughts, awake, my joy

John Mason. [Christmas.] Composed by John Mason, this carol of praise for the Incarnation was first published under the title "Song of Praise for the Birth of Christ" in his Songs of Praise (1683). The original text comprises 4 stanzas of 8 lines in Common Meter. It was reprinted in several subsequent seventeenth and eighteenth-century editions, as well as in Daniel Sedgwick's scholarly reprint of Mason's poetical works in 1859. Mason was one of the earliest English writers to compose original hymns for congregational and private devotion prior to the era of Isaac Watts. However, this specific Christmas piece saw very limited use in public worship hymnals during the nineteenth century. Its quaint phrasing, archaisms, and dramatic seventeenth-century poetic imagery were generally considered unsuited to modern congregational taste, though it remains valued by hymnological historians for its historical place in early Anglican hymnody.