I've been going through the liner notes booklet from Breathe Out, Breathe In and copying out the lyrics as they're printed. While transcribing "Christmas for the Free," I noticed something that should have been obvious: the third line ("Joy to the world at Christmas") quotes the Christmas hymn "Joy to the World," written by Isaac Watts. The first line of the hymn is "Joy to the world, the Lord is come!"
It also occurred to me that in the first two lines of the second verse, the clauses are inverted so that the predicate adjective precedes the subject: "Blunt is the pain of hunger / Cold is the wind of grief." That way, those qualities are emphasized.
