The first verse is: There are many variants of the song, collected by musicologists including Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp from the West of England at the start of the twentieth century.
The twelfth, cumulated, verse runs: The lyrics of the song are, in many places, exceedingly obscure, and present an unusual mixture of Christian catechesis, astronomical mnemonics, and what may be pagan cosmology.
The musicologist Cecil Sharp, influential in the folklore revival in England, noted in his 1916 One Hundred English Folksongs that the words are "so corrupt, indeed, that in some cases we can do little more than guess at their original meaning".
[1] "Green grow the rushes, Ho" (or "O"), the chorus, is not included in Sharp's version, which has simply the call and refrain "Come and I will sing to you.
Alternatively, they could be the seven stars of Revelation chapter 1, verse 16, which are held in the right hand of Christ and explained as referring to the seven angels of seven of the early Christian churches.
[1] Or it may refer to Ezekiel 9:2 where six men with swords come in a vision of the prophet to slaughter the people, whose leaders (8:16) have committed such sins as turning East to worship the Sun, and "have filled the land with violence".
Pastor Paul Kolch of Trinity Lutheran Church in Sacramento taught that the three referred to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who resisted burning in the fiery furnace and were "rivals" to the Babylonians.
[5] Sharp cites Baring-Gould's suggestion of an astronomical mnemonic, the Gemini twins (Castor and Pollux) or "signs for Spring".
[1] In support of this, Gemini is the northernmost constellation in the zodiac, therefore high in the winter sky in the northern hemisphere where the aurora borealis on occasion clothes the heavenly twins in green.
Another explanation is that the statues of St. John and St. Mary which, in traditionally configured Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, flank the crucifix on the altar reredos or the rood screen were bound with rushes to cover them, during Holy Week.
According to the writer and folklorist Tom Slemen, such practices were still being performed in secret in the last century, by a cult known as "The Lily White Boys" in the North West of England.
Its twelfth, cumulated, verse, is:[7] A similar variant is found in Winston Graham's The Twisted Sword (1990), the penultimate book in the Poldark series.
English folksinger Kate Rusby recorded a rendition of "The Dilly Carol" for her 2015 Christmas album The Frost is All Over: The correspondent added "It was sung in a monotone.