why am i so obsessed with christmas carol lyrics?

thomas and i were talking about in the bleak midwinter the other day -- it's his favorite christmas song -- and i discovered rather delightedly that the words were originally written by christina rossetti. well, almost. when holst put the poem to music, he ended each verse, as you know, with a dum(2)da(3)dum(2)dum(1)dum(1), and rossetti's poem only has three stressed syllables in each stanza's final line. this means that singers have to go through all kinds of contortions so that they don't sound like idiots (in the bleak midwinter, loooooong ago etc.), and everyone does it differently (dan folgelberg: oh so long ago; james taylor: long and long ago, and so on for each verse), which means that the original intended impact of those lines gets lost. go and read the original poem and you'll see what i mean.