George Harrison's song opens on a guitar figure that sounds like someone stepping outside to check the weather. Then he turns to a "little darling" and tells her the winter has been long and lonely. The ice is starting to melt. Smiles are coming back to people's faces. It feels like years since the sky was clear. And the sun is coming.
Notice the tense. He never sings that the sun is out. He sings that it is on its way. The song lives in the hour before full light, when you can see the change in the east but the frost is still on the ground. Again and again he says it's all right. He says it to her. He seems to be saying it to himself as well.
Relief arrives before the trouble is over. The sufferer cannot yet stand in the warmth. He can see it coming, and the seeing is enough to change his voice.
The Song and the Singer
The early months of 1969 were hard on Harrison. He had walked out on the Beatles for a stretch that January. Soon after, he was arrested for marijuana possession (Wikipedia). The band itself was coming apart, and the business side had swallowed the music. Harrison later wrote that Apple had become like school, all accountants and papers to sign (American Songwriter). He added that "winter in England goes on forever" (Wikipedia).
One spring day he skipped a meeting. He drove about twenty miles south to Eric Clapton's house in Ewhurst, Surrey (uDiscover Music). He described the relief of not having to face the accountants, and how he picked up one of Clapton's acoustic guitars and walked around the garden (The Paul McCartney Project). Clapton remembered it as a beautiful spring morning, maybe in April. Harrison began to sing the opening lines, and Clapton "just watched this thing come to life" (American Songwriter).
He finished it later on holiday in Sardinia. The Beatles recorded it that summer for Abbey Road, with Lennon absent at first while he recovered from a car accident (Beatles Bible). It came out in September 1969. Within months the band was finished.
Harrison spent much of his life searching for God, mostly through Hindu devotion, and he wrote openly religious songs. This one makes no claim about God. It is a song about weather and about a man getting out from under a weight. Read it on those terms. Its honesty lies in how small it is.
They That Watch for the Morning
The psalmist knew that hour before full light. "My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning" (Psalm 130:6). He says it twice. A watchman on the city wall stands through the dark because he knows the dark has an end. He cannot hurry the sun. He can be sure of it.
The same psalm opens "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD" (Psalm 130:1). It is written from inside a winter. The difference is what the man is waiting for. Harrison waits for the season to turn. The psalmist waits for the Lord, and the morning is his picture of how sure that wait is.
That sureness rests on a promise God made after the flood. "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22). Winter is written into the promise. So is its end. Harrison's "it's all right" leans on an order he did not have to name. Scripture says winters end because God keeps his word.
David's last words reach for the same image. A just ruler, he says, "shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain" (2 Samuel 23:3–4). Harrison's sky had not been clear in what felt like years. David's clear shining comes after rain. And in David's picture, the light comes from a king.
The Sun of Righteousness
The last page of the Hebrew prophets ends on a sunrise. "But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall" (Malachi 4:2).
The calves are the detail to watch. A farmer keeps them penned through the cold months. When the weather turns he opens the gate, and they come out bucking and running in the grass. Anyone who has seen it knows the sound of a creature let out after a long winter. Harrison's afternoon in Clapton's garden had some of that in it. He had slipped the pen of the Apple boardroom for a day.
Malachi's sun brings more than warmth. It arrives "with healing." The healing is in the rising itself. The Hebrew word for wings is kanaf. It is also the word for the corners of a garment, where God told Israel to hang the fringes "in the borders of their garments" (Numbers 15:38). A Jewish ear hears both at once. So did a woman in Galilee who had been bleeding for twelve years. She came up behind Jesus and "touched the hem of his garment," saying within herself that if she could only touch it she would be whole (Matthew 9:20–21). She reached for the corner where Malachi had put the healing. "And the woman was made whole from that hour" (Matthew 9:22).
After Malachi, the prophets fell silent for about four hundred years. The silence broke with an old priest named Zacharias, holding his newborn son. He sang that "the dayspring from on high hath visited us, To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace" (Luke 1:78–79). Dayspring is an old word for sunrise. Zacharias was singing about the one his son would announce. Here comes the sun.
A Sun That Does Not Go Down
Harrison knew the sun in his song would set. In the same season he had written "All Things Must Pass", which he released on his first solo album in 1970. In it he observes that a sunrise does not last all morning. He was right. The Beatles broke up within months of Abbey Road. More winters came. Harrison died of cancer in 2001. The relief in Clapton's garden was real, and it was seasonal. Every sun the song can see is one that goes down again.
Isaiah saw a different morning. "The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the LORD shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended" (Isaiah 60:19–20).
Paul ties that light back to the first morning of the world. "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). The light that ends Isaiah's mourning has a face.
Harrison's sunrise is a turn in the weather. Isaiah's is the Lord himself, and no evening follows it.
Harrison caught the moment the ice starts to give as well as anyone ever has. Isaiah looked further, to a morning with no winter waiting behind it.