In the way I read the song—I’m a musicologist at a university, with an emphasis on popular culture—almost everything in it has a double meaning or serves as an allegory for something else: the lamb a call for peace and the children Regney passed on the street, the child shivering in the cold referring to the children who would most certainly be killed in a nuclear attack, silver and gold as the human cost of war. The song contains many of the same elements found in traditional Christmas songs—strophic form (every stanza of text is set to the same music), call and response elements, and shifts in volume and pitch in each stanza—making its hidden meaning all the more indistinguishable.
Each line begins with a question that is pitched low and the answer is found in the notes that are higher in the scale later in the stanza. Each stanza sees the story pass from person, thing, or animal to someone else: the night wind to the little lamb in stanza one, the little lamb to the shepherd boy in stanza two, the shepherd boy to the king in stanza three, and the king to the people—us—in stanza four. Important contextual and symbolic words—lamb, see, star, kite, boy, king, hear, know, song, child, sea, say, (every)where, light—fall on long sustained notes, a technique used as far back as medieval Catholic chants. The word “everywhere” is the only one that has its final syllable sustained and the rest of the word broken among three notes (a possible symbol for the Trinity) but also draws attention to the pair’s call for universal peace sung at its highest volume and called for by the king in the song.
Regney and Shayne penned the song as a call for peace during a time of uncertainty, said Regney’s 2002 obituary in the New York Times—would there even be a world after the Cuban Missile Crisis? The song’s message was so poignant that the pair had difficulty singing through it without crying. Regney and Shayne’s favorite version of the song, in fact, was performed by Robert Goulet because he nearly shouted the line “pray for peace,” which was the real message of the song, Regney told the Times.