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For our Hymn of the Week, in accord with our Word of the Week, alive, we’re returning to a great Easter hymn we featured last year, Jesus Lives, but with a different (and more soaring) choral rendition, and with a fresh essay. Last year, I wrote mostly about the unusual climactic “Alleluia” for the melody, St. Albinus, that Henry Gauntlett wrote for it, as it ends not on the tonic note but on the third — and not the ordinary third, either, but an octave higher, fit for the joy of the season. Forgive me if I repeat some of the details of Gauntlett’s life — they are astonishing, or at least they are so to us, but in the old days there seem to have been boys like Gauntlett all over the place. He became the organist at the famous Olney Church when he was nine years old. Read that sentence again. This wasn’t an unknown church in the moors, either. It’s where the great revivalist John Newton preached, and where his friend and collaborator the poet William Cowper worshiped. Their book Olney Hymns had gone through 37 editions by 1836. Gauntlett studied law and worked as a lawyer till he was around 40, but all that while he was also composing sacred music and performing it as an organist, in two big churches in London. He built organs. He patented a method of electrifying some of the mechanisms. He wrote about 1,000 hymns, and composed melodies for many more. Doubtless you know of one, the melody Irby, for Once in Royal David’s City.

But in this essay I’m going to look more closely at the text of the hymn, the poem. It was written by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, the most prominent German poet in the mid-18th century, and the teacher of Goethe and Lessing. By the way, don’t you love those names? His was “Christian Fear-God Gellert,” like Wolfgang “Love God” Mozart. Gellert was not only a deeply devout man. He was a fine teacher, a winsome fellow whom everybody loved for his gentleness and his meek demeanor, though surely he was one of the most learned men in Germany in his lifetime. I’m now looking at the score — not for a congregation but for a pretty sophisticated choir — written for today’s hymn-poem by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, that is, C. P. E. Bach (not to be confused with the great comedian of our time, “P. D. Q. Bach,” a pun on what your Mom might tell you when she sent you on an errand to the grocer’s, “And be BACK PRETTY DARN QUICK!”). C. P. E. wrote a whole book of melodies to go with Gellert’s sacred odes and hymns, and he says, right at the beginning, that there’s no point in writing anything that would add to the fame of the creator of these works.

The poem itself has six stanzas, of six lines each. Each stanza begins with the words Jesus lebt — Jesus lives! That is the key to everything. Saint Paul will have no compromise, no “symbolic” or even “spiritual” resurrection. Jesus rose in the flesh: if not, says Paul, then “we are of all men most to be pitied.” And each stanza ends with the line, “Dies ist meine Zuversicht,” “This is my comfort.” And that’s how the English translator, Frances Cox, rendered it: “This shall be my confidence.” But before Henry Gauntlett wrote his splendid melody for the poem, Mrs. Cox’s translation had been altered to fit a four-line stanza, followed by an Alleluia fit for the season, and the first person singular pronoun had been revised in favor of the plural, because a whole congregation would be singing it during Eastertide as a congregation. It really is quite well done.

Each stanza treats of a single way in which Easter changes everything for us — or each looks straight at death and says that it has nothing to be proud of, it has no power to enslave us. More than that — it has been transformed. It is no longer the gate to the grave, but the gate to immortal life. Hence we must cleave to Jesus, giving ourselves wholly to him. Gellert echoes Saint Paul throughout: “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,” nothing at all in time and place can separate us from the love of Jesus. It’s all there in his first line: “Jesus lebt, mit ihm auch ich!” — “Jesus lives, and with him I too live.”

I’ll give the five-stanza Hymnal 1940 version below, followed by Gellert’s own first stanza in German, which I’ll translate for you in prose. It’s a glorious work all round.

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Jesus lives! thy terrors now
Can no longer, death, appall us;
Jesus lives! by this we know
Thou, O grave, canst not enthrall us.  Alleluia!

Jesus lives! henceforth is death
But the gate of life immortal;
This shall calm our trembling breath,
When we pass its gloomy portal.  Alleluia!

Jesus lives! for us he died;
Then, alone to Jesus living,
Pure in heart may we abide,
Glory to our Savior giving.  Alleluia!

Jesus lives! our hearts know well
Naught from us his love shall sever;
Life, nor death, nor powers of hell
Tear us from his keeping ever.  Alleluia!

Jesus lives! to him the throne
Over all the world is given:
May we go where he is gone,
Rest and reign with him in heaven.  Alleluia!

Jesus lebt! mit him auch ich!
Tod, wo sind nun deine Schrecken?
Er, er lebt und wird auch mich
Von den Toten auferwecken.
Er verklärt mich in sein Licht:
Dies ist meine Zuversicht.

"Jesus lives! with him I also live! Death, where are your terrors now? He, he lives, and he will waken me also from among the dead. He glorifies me in his light: this is my assurance."

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Sometimes I think that of all the Easter hymns, this one is the most surprising and most moving. It’s ideal for the second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday when we hear the account of Doubting Thomas, from the gospel of John. One of the old names for this feast was “Quasimodo Sunday,” and you’ll say, “A Sunday named for a hunchback bell-ringer in Notre-Dame de Paris?” Of course it’s the other way around: Victor Hugo named his bell-ringer after the Sunday, because that’s when the baby was found abandoned on the steps of the cathedral. But Hugo has in mind what gave the Sunday its name. It was the old Introit, the chant that was used at the opening of Mass. For this day, the Latin was, “Quasi modo geniti infantes, Alleluia, rationabile, sine dolo lac concupiscite, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia,” which comes from 1 Peter 2:2: “Crave, as newborn babes, the pure spiritual milk.” That message comes from Peter to all of us, that we should be as innocent and as guileless as little children. I like to think of those words as guiding the glorious arrangement of our Hymn of the Week, O Sons and Daughters, because, as you’ll hear, it’s the trebels who make for the glory of it all, in the final verses soaring with their alleluia above the deep voices of the grown men.

The hymn itself was written in Latin by a Frenchman, a Franciscan friar named Jean Tisserand, who was in fact located in Paris. He was a brilliant preacher, and something of an itinerant, because he would spend a month or so at each of the big churches in Paris, one by one, including the cathedral, of course. It is likely that he was the chaplain for the royal family of Charles VIII and Queen Anne of Brittany. He also founded an order in Paris for Filles-Repenties, literally, for repentant daughters; I imagine, for girls of the street who turned from their old and sad and self-destructive ways. We don’t do anything nearly as gracious for them, or nearly as beautiful.

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I’ve often pointed out here that sometimes the most profound art comes from the confluence of two very different sources: the popular, and the learned; and the sacred traditions of Christian feasts have freely embraced both. Now, obviously when Tisserand wrote his hymn, he knew that most Frenchmen were not going to read the Latin, though he also might well expect, since French is one of Latin’s daughter languages, that it would not be entirely foreign to them, either. The meter he writes in is 8-8-8, a rhyming triplet of eight syllables in each line, followed by the alleluia. That meter itself was, originally, back in the fourth and fifth centuries, a popular one, not “classic,” but the Church made free and fruitful use of such poetry — meters with lines of equal length from stanza to stanza, and employing rhyme, which gave coherence to the stanzas. That in fact is how stanzaic poetry entered the popular languages of Europe, first those that descended from Latin, and then, by imitation, other languages such as English. It meant that you could use the same melody too, and so it happened that the popular song and the sacred hymn came together. And we so often find in medieval hymns, the influence of Gregorian chant is very strong; you don’t have hippity-hop tempos or unusual intervals. The movement from note to note is natural and easy, and never threatens to overwhelm the words.

And what words they are! Imagine singing “Alleluia” after the stanza in which you sing that Thomas doubted — where’s the rejoicing in that? It’s that we know that he will not always doubt. Good Friday is good because there is Easter. The Samaritan woman at the well might have been a tragic figure, but Jesus is there asking for a drink of water. The Prodigal squanders his whole inheritance, but we regard it with wonder and gratitude, because we know that he will say, in the depths of his distress, “I shall arise and go to my father’s house.” This is a hymn you really ought to sing all the way through, from the Easter morning, to the race of John and Peter to the tomb, to Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in the locked room when Thomas is not there, to Thomas’s doubt, then Jesus’ appearance when Thomas is with them, Thomas’s wonder-filled confession of faith, the application of the lesson to us now, and the final call to rejoice.

There are quite a few English translations of the hymn, some of which include and some of which omit a couple of stanzas that were inserted after Tisserand’s death. I’m providing one of the best English translations, by the great John Mason Neale. The arrangement here, sung by the Ely Cathedral choir to Neale’s stanzas, covers the full range from the simple and direct to a veritable tapestry of glory.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Ye sons and daughters of the King,
Whom heavenly hosts in glory sing,
Today the grave hath lost its sting, Alleluia!

On that first morning of the week,
Before the day began to break,
The Marys went their Lord to seek, Alleluia!

An angel bade their sorrow flee,
For thus he spake unto the three:
"Your Lord is gone to Galilee," Alleluia!

That night the apostles met in fear,
Amidst them came their Lord most dear,
And said: 'Peace be unto you here,' Alleluia!

'Thomas, behold my side,' saith he,
'My hands, my feet, my body see;
And doubt not, but believe in me,' Alleluia!

No longer Thomas then denied;
He saw the feet, the hands, the side;
'Thou art my Lord and God,' he cried, Alleluia!

Blessed are they that have not seen,
And yet whose faith hath constant been,
In life eternal they shall reign, Alleluia!

On this most holy day of days,
To God your hearts and voices raise
In laud, and jubilee, and praise, Alleluia!

And we with Holy Church unite,
As evermore is just and right,
In glory to the King of light, Alleluia!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

So then, in 1695, a Latin poem on the Resurrection, called “Finita iam sunt proelia,” meaning “The battles now are over,” was printed in a Jesuit hymn book that I can’t find a copy of. The author is anonymous. At first glance, there’s nothing especially striking about the poem. Each stanza has three lines; the first two rhyme, and the third one says, in various forms, “Let us sing and rejoice,” with one slight but climactic change for the final line of the final stanza, “So that we may live and rejoice.” That might lead you to look a little more carefully, and sure enough, you’ll be rewarded for your attention. Here is the rhyming couplet for the fourth of the five stanzas:

Sunt clausa Stygis ostia
Et caeli patent atria.

Which means, if I may translate with a few figurative suggestions in mind, “Shut are the jaws of Hell, / And the porches of Heaven are open wide.” For Hell wants to swallow us; Heaven, to welcome us in.

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Well then, a translator and composer of hymns, the Reverend Francis Pott, a contemporary of John Henry Newman at Oxford, took up the poem and gave it to us in English in the form we know as “The Strife is O’er,” one of the best-beloved Easter hymns in our language. He made two interesting and excellent decisions. First, he decided to make each stanza a rhyming triplet: and those can be quite powerful, because the third line strikes with increased force, summing up the previous two or turning back on them in a startling way. If you want more examples of how mighty the rhyming triplet can be, see George Herbert’s poem “The Sacrifice,” or the Easter hymn, “Ye Sons and Daughters,” or the haunting medieval Dies Irae. Second, Reverend Pott decided he would let the final Alleluia in each stanza bear the force of the original final lines urging us to sing, so that he would have three lines in each stanza rather than two to express his full meaning. The result is flawless.

And what about the music? We have two common melodies for the hymn. One is called Victory, by Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (1525-1594), a man whom many people consider the greatest of all composers of polyphonic choral motets — yet, in this rare case, he composed a straight-up melody for instruments. The other is usually called Vulpius or Gelobt Sei Gott, and that’s the one we’ve got below, so named for the German composer Melchior Vulpius (1570-1615), who set to music a German poem in celebration of Easter, “Gelobt sei Gott im hoechsten Thron,” “Praise be to God enthroned on high.” Vulpius was writing Passion chorales almost a hundred years before Johann Sebastian Bach, who — as he often did — took up the melody of a predecessor and developed it.

But it was finally another Englishman, the music professor, composer, and organist Henry George Ley (1887-1962), who said to himself, “You know, that melody by Vulpius would go very well with that translation by Pott,” and put the two together. From 1926 to 1945, Ley was in charge of the chapel music at Eton College. That’s not a “college” in the American sense of the word. It’s a boarding school for boys aged 13-18; a “middle school” and high school. Not bad, having such a fellow to direct your music, when a lot of you haven’t even started to shave yet!

God accomplishes great things by what is small — even by “unconsidered trifles.” But what happened on the first day of the week long ago in Jerusalem, without noise, without parades, shook the world to its depths, and is the very hinge of time and eternity.

The strife is o'er, the battle done;
Now is the Victor's triumph won;
O let the song of praise be sung.
Alleluia!

Death's mightiest powers have done their worst,
And Jesus hath his foes dispersed;
Let shouts of praise and joy outburst.
Alleluia!

On the third morn he rose again
Glorious in majesty to reign;
O let us swell the joyful strain.
Alleluia!

He brake the age-bound chains of hell;
The bars from heaven's high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise his triumph tell.
Alleluia!

Lord, by the stripes which wounded thee,
From death's dread sting thy servants free,
That we may live, and sing to thee.
Alleluia!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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When genius and piety come together, expect wonders. When it’s several geniuses, one after another, all of them men of deep piety, expect the immortal.

Our Hymn of the Week is one, I am guessing, that every Christian speaker of English or German has heard and sung, the mighty and profoundly moving “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded,” sometimes translated as “O Sacred Head Surrounded,” and in German, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.” What you might not know is how it has come down to us as the most renowned of Holy Week hymns. Though it has been attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who surely was capable of writing it and whose devotions and theology it reflects, scholars have long given the credit to one of Bernard’s successors in the Cistercian life, the Belgian abbot Arnulf of Leuven. And Arnulf didn’t just write the Latin original of what we know as our hymn. He wrote a 74-stanza poem of five lines each, dwelling with loving meditation on seven members of the body of Jesus upon the Cross: the feet (10), the knees (10), the hands (10), the side (10), the breast (10), the heart (14), and the face (10). It’s from those last 10 stanzas, on the face of Jesus, that we get our English and German renderings of the poem in the form of a hymn.

But we in English didn’t get them directly. The great Paul Gerhardt translated Arnulf’s work into German, in stanzas of eight lines, not five, rhyming ABABCDCD, with the syllable count of 7-6-7-6 doubled. More on that structure shortly. Then the organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude got hold of it, and wrote a series of seven cantatas, meant to be performed together, on each of the seven members. But 74 stanzas would prove much too long. Instead he selected three stanzas from each section, and prefaced them with a verse from Scripture, in five-voice harmony. So, for example, the very first section, on the feet, begins with this beautiful verse from the prophet Nahum: “Ecce super montes pedes evangelizantis et annunciatis pacem,” which means, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of him who brings good news and tidings of peace!” Think of that as coming immediately before you are to dwell with love and sorrow upon the feet of Jesus, nailed to the Cross. The contrast is meant to startle, sure. But it also compels us to consider: there would be no feet upon the mountains bringing good news, if there had been no Jesus on the Cross, nailing to that true tree of life every sin ever committed by man from Adam on.

That’s the first part. What about the seventh, the climax of all, dwelling upon the face of Jesus? That begins with a verse from the Psalms: “Let your face shine upon your servant, and save me in your mercy.” We imagine the beaming smile of a God of grace and favor — and then we get these words, which I’ll give in the original Latin, which was Buxtehude’s text:

Salve, caput cruentatum,
totum spinis coronatum,
vulneratum, conquassatum,
arundine verberatum,
facie sputis illita.

There the first four lines, all rhyming, strike again and again the blows of our guilt: “Hail, head covered with blood, all crowned with thorns, wounded and battered, whipped with the scourge, thy face smeared with spittle.”

I don’t have the words to do justice to that contrast.

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But what about the melody? Buxtehude didn’t come up with it on his own. He adopted an earlier melody by Hans Leo Hassler, and it wasn’t for a hymn, but for a sad love song, whose first line you might translate colloquially as “My mood is all mixed up!” or, to be more poetic, “My heart is all astray.” Hassler did compose a good deal of sacred music, but this song wasn’t part of that. It’s to Buxtehude’s immense credit, I think, that he saw the possibility of adapting Hassler’s melody for use in his deeply pious cantatas — and he did revise the melody, making it less jaunty, more stately, more subtle, more complex, but preserving Hassler’s ending not on the tonic note but on the third, which strikes the ear as resolved but open-ended, in the air, waiting.

And then Buxtehude’s melody and Gerhardt’s poem were taken up by a fellow you will have heard of: Johann Sebastian Bach. The hymn, scored for two trebels, tenor, baritone, and bass, is sung, each of five stanzas one at a time spread out through the work, in his magnificent Saint Matthew Passion. It’s the foundation of the whole. But the singers don’t sing exactly the same notes from verse to verse; there are four different arrangements, the most hauntingly lovely of them something that only the most skilled and proficient choirs should attempt.

Every Christian should sing this hymn at least once during Passiontide. You may know it in several English versions, because a lot of people have tried their hands at it, some working straight from the Latin, others straight from the German, others looking at both at once. Don’t let those variations trouble you — I don’t mean the mischief that editors do when they expunge the early Modern English pronouns (thou, thee). The good translations I’ve seen all strive to be both faithful and beautiful. I have included below the poet Robert Bridges’ translation (1899).

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

O sacred head, sore wounded,
Defiled and put to scorn;
O kingly head, surrounded
With mocking crown of thorn:
What sorrow mars thy grandeur?
Can death thy bloom deflower?
O countenance whose splendor
The hosts of heaven adore!

Thy beauty, long desired,
Hath vanished from our sight;
Thy power is all expired,
And quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest,
Hide not so far thy grace;
Show me, O Love most highest,
The brightness of thy face.

In thy most bitter passion
My heart to share doth cry,
With thee for my salvation
Upon the cross to die.
Ah, keep my heart thus moved
To stand thy cross beneath,
To mourn thee, well-beloved,
And thank thee for thy death.

My days are few, O fail not,
With thine immortal power,
To hold me that I quail not
In death's most fearful hour,
That I may fight befriended,
And see in my last strife
To me thine arms extended
Upon the cross of life.

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Isaac Watts was a precocious child. He learned Latin, Greek, French, and Hebrew by age 13 — Latin, by age 4. Of course, he did have quite a few advantages that our children don’t have. There was no television then, nor the internet, nor mass-marketed books. Life was harsher, and punishments for offenders were more cruel, and nobody knew what a germ was, so that when resurgences of the plague occurred, the church bells would be tolling all the time. But school, for Isaac, was the local grammar school in Southampton, taught by an Anglican minister, and I think we can be pretty confident that whatever else you might say about such a place, that it wasted time was not one of them. We can get a fair idea of what a child learned in school by the sophistication of common items in print, or by people’s letters or their diary entries, or by such popular items as published sermons and hymns.

The great prayer-book of the Bible is the Psalms, of course, and there had been several attempts to render all of them into English verse, so they could be sung by congregations, typically by Scotch and Welsh dissenters: that’s the origin of the Scottish Psalter, which I admire. There were two problems, as the young Isaac saw them. The first was that the hymns stuck to only one or two meters, severely restricting the melodies they could be sung to. The second was that the poetry wasn’t of a consistently high quality. So his father one day urged him to give the English-speaking world something better. And Watts, who had been reading the Book of Revelation, wrote that night the first two stanzas of a hymn inspired by the text. Here is the opening stanza:

Behold the glories of the Lamb
Amidst his Father’s throne;
Prepare new honors for his name
And songs before unknown.

Watts was 16 years old when he wrote those words. He was about to go to a place called Newington Academy, in London, to continue to study those four languages I’ve mentioned, and also philosophy, theology, mathematics, and the natural sciences, graduating at age 19.

When Bede the Venerable told the story of the life of the cow-herd Caedmon, illiterate, but inspired by God to compose sacred poetry in the ancient form of Old English alliterative meter, he said that the monks at Whitby would read to Caedmon from the Bible, let’s say the story of Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, and Caedmon would retire to his cell, and, “like the cow chewing the cud,” would transform what he had heard into song. I like that image of ruminating: that’s what Caedmon did, and that’s what Isaac Watts did. He read, he allowed the words to enter him, and he thought about them, or he let them inspire and form his thoughts, and after all that, he used the talent God gave him, a talent that the rest of his family knew very well, to write some of the most sublime sacred poems in our language, sublime in their simplicity, their directness, their concentrated thought, and their deep personal feeling. We’ve had a lot of excellent hymnodists in English, but I think that even Charles Wesley must yield the laurel to Isaac Watts.

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The Scripture that inspired Watts to write “My Soul, Repeat His Praise,” was Psalm 103, particularly verses 8-17. It’s the psalm that begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” and it dwells, with profound gratitude, on the compassion of God, who “has not dealt with us according to our sins,” for “as a father hath compassion on his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that fear him.” It moves me all the more, in that I miss my own father, who died in 1991, eleven years younger than I am now; and the Watts family was as close as any family can be, and Isaac felt his father’s love at all times.

The faith too is a great consolation. We must know, somewhere, despite the fancy-dress we put on our follies and our failings, that we need far more than we can give ourselves. To turn then in love to the God whose mercy is from eternity to eternity, and to seek that mercy, is nothing other than to admit reality. Isaac Watts — whom we may also call Dr. Watts — was a man of most logical mind, a scientist and logician of the first rank. And in his excellent hymns, he shows us the way by song.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

My soul, repeat His praise
Whose mercies are so great;
Whose anger is so slow to rise,
So ready to abate.

God will not always chide;
And, when His wrath is felt,
His strokes are fewer than our crimes
And lighter than our guilt.

High as the heavens are raised
Above the ground we tread,
So far the riches of His grace
Our highest thoughts exceed.

His grace subdues our sins,
And His forgiving love
Far as the east is from the west
Doth all our guilt remove.

The pity of the Lord,
To those who fear His name,
Is such as tender parents feel;
He knows our feeble frame.

Our days are as the grass,
Or like the morning flower!
If one sharp blast sweep o'er the field,
It withers in an hour.

But thy compassions, Lord,
To endless years endure;
And children's children ever find
Thy words of promise sure.

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t’s actually quite a long prayer, a couple of pages of Old Irish, and I’ve seen an edition that argues that we really ought to understand it as such: “I bind myself to the strong power, the invocation of the Trinity.” I’m not proficient in Old Irish, so I can’t decide the matter. But good Lord, what power! Well then, you might suppose that some Irish soldier and scholar translated it into English for our hymnals, but it isn’t so. It was our beloved Mrs. Alexander, Cecil Frances Alexander, the author of hundreds of hymns especially for children, such as Once in Royal David’s City. It’s part translation, part paraphrase, and much of the original is left out, as was fitting, but she’s well captured the confidence, the daring, the stalwart and straightforward declaration of truth, that shines like burnished bronze. As it should well do. We hear from an Old Irish song sung by Fiacc, one of the druids whom Patrick converted to the faith, that the saint when he came to Ireland, “In Slane, in the territory of Benn-Boirche, he had not thirst nor hunger; he sang a hundred psalms every night; he served the angels’ King. He slept on a bare stone then, and wet reeds around him; a pillar-stone was his pillow; he left not his body in warmth. He preached the Gospel to everyone, he wrought great marvels widely; he healed the halt with the lepers, dead he raised them to life.” Patrick himself wrote, with wonder at God’s works, that “it has come to pass that in Ireland they who never had any knowledge, and until now have worshiped only idols and unclean things, have lately become a people of the Lord, and are called sons of God.”

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There’s another feature of this hymn that makes it most unusual. After saying, again and again, “I bind unto myself,” Patrick shifts the focus to Christ: Christ becomes the subject of the sentences. And most aren’t sentences in the English sense. They are the name of Christ, followed by one of those personal prepositions, all ending in -m, meaning me: so then, Crist lim, Crist remam: Christ with me, Christ before me, and so on, above, below, at my right, at my left — everywhere, and even in the heart of every man who thinks of me. For this part of the hymn, since the lines are so different, you need a different melody, and sure enough, that is how it is sung, before we return in the final stanza to the original melody, and the return is all the more powerful for the suspense in which we’ve been holding it. Both melodies are traditional Irish airs, arranged by the British composer Charles Villiers Stanford. It surely is one of the mightiest hymns of all time.

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I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three.

I bind this day to me forever,
By power of faith, Christ's incarnation,
His baptism in the Jordan river,
His death on cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spiced tomb,
His rising up the heavenly way,
His coming at the day of doom,
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of cherubim,
The sweet 'Well done' in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim;
Confessors' faith, apostles' word,
The patriarchs' prayers, the prophets' scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord,
And purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even;
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, his might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need;
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, his shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of whom all nature hath creation;
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Miss Trupp, like many Christian women of her day, wrote quite a lot with children in mind, and this week’s hymn, “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” first appeared in a hymnal specifically for children. I’d rather not think too hard about what the Dorothy Trupps in our time are writing for children, not for the faith, not steeped in centuries of intelligent meditation upon the Scriptures, and not well versed in English poetry. But when Miss Trupp reminds us about how Jesus instructs us to pray, she reminds us at the same time that we ourselves are to be like children: “They are to say, ‘Our Father’ in the simplicity, and in the spirit of little children, seeking the glory of their Father, which is in heaven, and the establishment of His kingdom upon the earth; in the spirit also of humble and daily dependence, asking the daily and needful supplies, of the bread of heaven to nourish the soul, and of the food that perishes, for the perishing tabernacle.”

That’s a good introduction to the text of our hymn, whose thought springs from Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and the gospel of John, “I am the Good Shepherd.” What can we say about sheep? They need to be fed. They cannot safely go forth on their own, but need a shepherd to guide them. They are harmless — as innocent as little children. They are far from the spirit of modern man, who prides himself on his towers that scrape the sky, but can no more climb to heaven than can a rope of sand.

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A little note on the form of the hymn: It employs what we might call a variable refrain. The first half of each stanza is complete in itself, rhyming ABAB. These stanzas also form a progression, and in the final two stanzas the author lays a strong stress on our being early to seek the favor of God, alternating the words early and blessed, and doing so in a most pointed and effective way. Why early? Why not, since the hymn first appeared in a work for children. But the second half of each stanza is a four-line refrain, with lines one and three, as an invocation preceding the verb, always “Blessed Jesus, blessed Jesus.” Lines two and four rhyme, and in a general way complete the thought of the verse. It is as if there we were singing two poems concurrently, one the hymn itself, and the second, the hymn inside the hymn, made up of the refrains from one to the next. And the final line of all is open to the eternal: “Thou hast loved us, love us still.”

Savior, like a shepherd lead us,
Much we need Thy tender care;
In Thy pleasant pastures feed us,
For our use Thy folds prepare:
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Thou hast bought us, Thine we are;
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Thou hast bought us, Thine we are.

We are Thine, do Thou befriend us,
Be the guardian of our way;
Keep Thy flock, from sin defend us,
Seek us when we go astray:
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Hear, O hear us when we pray;
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Hear, O hear us when we pray.

Thou hast promised to receive us,
Poor and sinful though we be;
Thou hast mercy to relieve us,
Grace to cleanse, and pow'r to free:
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Early let us turn to Thee;
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Early let us turn to Thee.

Early let us seek Thy favor,
Early let us do Thy will;
Blessed Lord and only Savior,
With Thy love our bosoms fill:
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Thou hast loved us, love us still;
Blessèd Jesus, blessèd Jesus,
Thou hast loved us, love us still.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Thou once hast washed me in thy own heart’s blood;
Thou since hast often washed me with thy tears;
And drops will wear at length the rocky stone.

Haven’t I often said here, at Word and Song, that periods of cultural vigor are not, as some people say, illusions caused by our attending only to the great successes while we overlook the mediocre. They are instead like mighty mountain ranges. Mount Everest does not suddenly thrust itself up out of the river deltas of southeast Asia. Its base is a lofty plateau already more than a mile above the sea, and it is girded round with mountains — the Himalayas, 1500 miles long. When genius is abroad, the near-genius follows, and who can tell how long the flourishing will last? What Giotto began in painting came to full flower in the Renaissance. Everyone in young Williams’ set at Eton and then at Oxford — notable among them, the high-church tractarian John Keble, the Wilberforces, and John Henry Newman — was steeped in classical poetry, the Church Fathers, English poetry and hymnody, and the vigorous missionary action of men and women who might do braver things than to go to India; they might even go to the shipyards of Liverpool. Newman himself wrote his greatest sermons not for college graduates but for the men and women of industrial Birmingham. Williams, a man of frail health, spent most of his adult life in Bisley, a village in Gloucestershire, as the curate of Thomas Keble, John’s younger brother. That is where he wrote The Baptistery, the source of our Lenten Hymn of the Week, “Lord, in This Thy Mercy’s Day.”

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Here is the context. Williams composed The Baptistery around 34 meditations, not sprinkled at random but leading, step by step, from life on earth and its material and spiritual struggles, to the end of time and Judgment Day. And the dawning of that day is the subject of his 20th meditation, which he calls “The Great Manifestation.” Everything once hidden in darkness will come into the light; all the good we have done, and all the bad; every earnest prayer, and every idle word. Williams was expert in many English meters, some of them rather difficult, such as the Spenserian stanza, but he chose for this poem the solemn, mighty, and deceptively simple meter he found in that Latin hymn of final judgment, the Dies Irae. The stanzas are rhyming triplets, the meter is trochaic tetrameter, but, unlike the Dies Irae, Williams chooses to truncate the ends of his lines by finishing on the stressed syllable, thus: DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM. The effect is arresting. You’ll find its meter scored in the hymnals as 7 7 7, the only such that I’m aware of.

Here is an example of the power that such a meter can summon up, as Williams compares, with laconic understatement and swift economy, the sense we feel when something we have long expected has finally come, with what we shall feel on that day of the Lord:

Oft we feel the die is cast,
And a long expectance past,
And the Hour is come at last:

So in silence of the tomb
In a moment shall have come
The expected Day of doom.

The man who wrote those words knew what he was doing.

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Our hymn, then, comes from a passage of several stanzas at the conclusion of this poem, which was, as I’ve said, but one portion of a very long and complex work — actually, several hundred pages long. The text has been tweaked a little, in every hymnal I’ve seen, to make it better suited for song. In it, Williams invokes not his own tears, but those that Jesus shed when he looked at Jerusalem below. The problem in our time, as C. S. Lewis said, is not so much to cut down jungles as to irrigate deserts. Our feelings, no matter how loud we shout, are often fitful and dull. Not by my tears, Lord, save me — but by thine.

A last note: the melody we’ve got here was composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and he certainly knew what the hymn was about. That’s why he gave it the name he did: LACRYMAE, the Latin for tears.

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Our hymn today is sung by one of Debra’s favorite groups, the Scottish Festival Singers. It is sublime.

Lord, in this thy mercy's day,
Ere for us it pass away,
On our knees we fall and pray.

Holy Jesu, grant us tears,
Fill us with heart-searching fears,
Ere that fateful doom appears.

Lord, on us thy Spirit pour,
Kneeling lowly at thy door,
Ere it close forevermore.

By thy night of agony,
By thy supplicating cry,
By thy willingness to die,

By thy tears of bitter woe
For Jerusalem below,
Let us not thy love forgo.

Judge and Savior of our race,
Grant us, when we see thy face,
With thy ransomed ones a place.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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That’s because we don’t know who the author of the hymn was. There is a guess that it was Charles Wesley, whom we’ve featured several times here, and it certainly is fine enough to be his work. Who would have the temerity to fool around with the words of Charles Wesley? These days, when the editors of hymnals have no sense of poetry, there would be plenty, but not so many in the 18th century, when our hymn was written. On the other hand, if there’s no name attached to it, people might replace one of the verses with a stronger one, or insert a verse where there hadn’t been one, or tweak a line or two — and that happened with our hymn. The version I’m giving here is what appears in the Hymnal 1940, but I’m also going to append a verse that seems to have been original, though it is now hard to find. In any case, the anonymity doesn’t suggest that hymn-writing was rare. Just the reverse; it was frequent and flourishing — as was sacred painting in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and do we have any idea from what particular souls came the great Negro spirituals? Or the jaunty carols from merry England?

You can also guess why I’ve chosen this hymn. The Word of the Week is three, and I’ve discussed Andrei Rublev’s renowned icon of the Trinity, so we have here a hymn in honor of the Three divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Such a hymn ought to have four verses, one for each Person, and one, a doxology, for the Trinity together. The odd thing is that many early versions of the hymn have five verses, with two devoted to the Son of God: one each, so to speak, to the two natures of Christ, human and divine. But I think that the four-stanza structure works better — no distraction or danger of losing the train of thought. And it is a mighty hymn, praising the Father’s might ahd kingship, the Son’s word and his righteousness, and the Spirit dwelling in our hearts.

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A little about the composer of the melody, which goes by the names of “Moscow” and “Italian Hymn.” He was Felice Giardini, yet another boy genius; imagine at age 12 being the leader of an orchestra for an Italian opera at La Scala in Milan, the great center of Italian classical music. He was himself the first violin, and one night, around this time, when he improvised some show-off riffs within the melody, the composer, Niccolo Jommelli, got so angry he gave Felice a swat upside the head, to teach him not to do that anymore. Jommelli was himself just a teenage boy when it happened. But he was important for restraining ornateness in opera when it got in the way of the drama, and keeping the lead singers within bounds. Anyway, Felice Giardini, a good friend of Johann Christoph Bach and the Bach family, ended up in England when Italian opera there was all the rage, and the elderly Handel was the most celebrated composer in the nation and perhaps all of Europe. Giardini was named the head of the Italian Opera in London, and people flocked not only to hear his orchestra, but to hear him — he himself was the star.

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Come, thou almighty King,
Help us thy Name to sing,
Help us to praise.
Father whose love unknown
All things created own,
Build in our hearts thy throne,
Ancient of Days.

Come, thou Incarnate Word,
By heaven and earth adored;
Our prayer attend:
Come, and thy people bless;
Come, give thy word success;
Stablish thy righteousness,
Savior and friend.

Come, Holy Comforter,
Thy sacred witness bear
In this glad hour:
Thou, who almighty art,
Now rule in every heart,
And ne'er from us depart,
Spirit of power.

To thee, great One in Three,
The highest praises be,
Hence evermore;
Thy sovereign majesty
May we in glory see,
And to eternity
Love and adore.

(Alternate second verse in many early hymnals)
Jesus our Lord, arise,
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall!
Let thine Almighty aid,
Our sure defence be made,
Our souls on thee be stay'd;
Lord hear our call!

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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Now someone may ask, “Why did Jesus fast for forty days and nights?” It was no whim. The rain that drowned the world in the days of Noah fell for forty days and nights. Moses went up Mount Sinai for forty days and nights without food or drink, and he came down from the mountain with the Law, fire-written on the stone tablets. Jesus, in doing what he did, gave his disciples-to-be an unmistakeable sign. He does not bring the New Law, in stone. He is himself the New Law, which is to be written on the human heart. That’s why he says, “You have heard it said to men of old,” and then he cites the Law of Moses, but he follows it with what is higher and holier and apparently impossible for us sinners to attain — it is impossible, without grace. And he says, “But I say to you,” showing us that, unlike Moses, he need not be a spokesman for God. He, the Son, speaks on his own authority.

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I can’t say that I’ve ever been any good at fasting. I wish I were. If Jesus asked you at the time to accompany him into the mountains, would you have gone? We’ll all say, “Yes, sure!” But our habits say otherwise. Which is easier to fast from, snacks between meals, or pride? Meat on Friday, or self-promotion on Thursday? The author of our hymn this week, Claudia Hernaman, brings to mind that more difficult fast in the context of the easier one — though we don’t find the easier one easy at all, do we? Perhaps body and soul are more intricately interwoven than we usually like to think. Fasting, then, or any Lenten discipline, ought to be defined as a power, as “exercise,” to use Milton’s word, as of somebody training to be in trim for battle. It’s interesting, too, to consider that Mrs. Hernaman, married to an Anglican minister, devoted most of her many publications to the religious education of children. Hard to think of children and Lent at the same time, isn’t it? Small children of course aren’t supposed to fast, and what great sins do they have to confess?

But here I’ll let Mrs. Hernaman speak for herself, from the preface to a book of hymns and devotions she wrote for children, under the initials “C. F. H.”: “It is hardly necessary to say that ‘The Child’s Book of Praise’ is designed for both sexes, in every class of life, who by Holy Baptism, have been made members of Christ, children of God, and heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven — “called to be Saints” — and bound to walk, day by day, with faithful and loving perseverance, in the Cross-marked Footprints of the King of the Saints. It must be still less necessary to add how very far the writer of the book has failed to reach her own aim. For, this is the feeling which, if not uppermost in her mind, is only second to the earnest hope that her failings will be kindly interpreted, and her humble endeavors may be turned to the Glory of God, and the Salvation of Souls.”

You see, to walk with Jesus is to walk in those “Cross-marked Footprints,” and that’s for everyone. They shine with glory.

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Debra has noted lately that Youtube no longer is providing old recordings of the beautiful traditional hymns that we like to share at Word & Song. Here, however, is a very fine organ arrangement (with soft congregational singing) of a wonderful hymn. Our son will be playing this hymn at the organ this week.

Lord, who throughout these forty days
for us didst fast and pray,
teach us with Thee to mourn our sins
and close by Thee to stay.

As Thou with Satan didst contend,
and didst the victory win,
O give us strength in Thee to fight,
in Thee to conquer sin.

As Thou didst hunger bear and thirst,
so teach us, gracious Lord,
to die to self, and chiefly live
by Thy most holy word.

And through these days of penitence,
and through Thy passiontide,
yea, evermore in life and death,
Jesus, with us abide.

Abide with us, that so, this life
of suffering overpast,
an Easter of unending joy
we may attain at last!

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

The sun is but a spark of fire,
A transient meteor through the sky;
The soul, immortal as its Sire,
Shall never die!

A brilliant line, that one: “The sun is but a spark of fire.” That is true. What is the sun, compared with the breath of God in man?

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James Montgomery wrote more than 400 hymns (including one of my favorites that we’ve featured here, Songs of Praise the Angels Sang) not to mention some pretty substantial works in other poetic modes, and he had a strong and deserved reputation in England. Lord Byron, of all people, stood up for him against some carping critics. I say, “of all people,” because Byron was, at least by public reputation, the last man alive to be found beside a writer of hymns. Yet the same Lord Byron, in Venice, attached himself to a monastery of Armenian Christians, under whom he learned the Armenian language and ended up translating parts of the Armenian Bible. Only God knows the secret corners of our hearts. We ourselves may be hardly aware of them.

But James Montgomery was almost the inverse of Byron in many ways. Byron, as a child, was precocious and spoiled, growing up in the midst of upper-class decadence. Montgomery was born to a family of modest means; his mother and father died as missionaries when he was a boy. Byron’s name blazed across Europe, as he intended that it should. Of his own poetry, Montgomery said that he would be remembered, if at all, for his hymns. Byron’s heroes are titanic, hurling defiance against God. Montgomery — and this is true of our hymn today — worshiped the God who came among us in the flesh, choosing a humble birth. Yet when Byron died in Greece, fighting for Greek independence from the Turk, I am sure that Montgomery mourned for him and approved the cause for which he died.

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Humility is the secret of true greatness, and so secret it is, that the most brilliant of pagan philosophers seem hardly to have encountered it, though I think that if you consider it carefully, and if you include modesty and a penchant for holding your peace, you will find it in the Chinese sages and in the ironical Socrates and the mystic Plotinus. I’m not speaking sentimentally here. Humility opens up the soul. “Unless you become as little children,” says Jesus, “you shall not enter the kingdom of God.” You cannot become like God who condescended to create the world — even to create you and me.

Oh, and one last thing, if you’ll forgive a jest to conclude — guess what word in our hymn picks up yesterday’s discussion of H’s? Humble! For Montgomery wrote that Jesus chose “an humble” birth — and there we can hear all over again some fourteenth century cook serving up a numble pie — which became an humble pie — and then just humble pie.

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When Jesus left His Father's throne,
He chose an humble birth;
Like us, unhonored and unknown,
He came to dwell on earth.
Like Him may we be found below,
In wisdom's path of peace;
Like Him in grace and knowledge grow,
As years and strength increase.

Sweet were His words and kind His look,
When mothers round Him pressed;
Their infants in His arms He took,
And on His bosom blessed.
Safe from the world's alluring harms,
Beneath His watchful eye,
Thus in the circle of His arms
May we for ever lie.

When Jesus into Sion rode,
The children sang around;
For joy they plucked the palms, and strowed
Their garments on the ground.
Hosanna our glad voices raise,
Hosanna to our King!
Should we forget our Savior's praise,
The stones themselves would sing.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Anna Maria was the last Washington born at Mount Vernon (1851). She married an Episcopalian priest, Rev. Beverly Dandridge Tucker, who took part in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. When she died in 1927, she was survived by 13 children, four of whom, including our author, were ordained to the ministry, and an additional two sons who worked in the mission field at St. John’s College in Shanghai, one a physician and the other a professor. That was before the Communists took power; they shut the university down in 1952. The college’s most illustrious graduate was Wellington Koo, a one-time president of China, who among many other things was the first signer of the United Nations Charter.

By the way, Bland Tucker, working in Savannah during the civil rights movement, kept his church open to anyone, no questions asked. Other ministers had been denying entrance to people they suspected of wanting to stage a sit-in. By all accounts he was both brave and meek, a rare combination.

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How does that span all of Christian history? It doesn’t — but the prayer Tucker chose to translate goes back to the beginnings indeed. The text comes from the Didache, that is, the Teaching of the Lord Given by the Twelve Apostles to the Nations. It’s a tremendously powerful text, dating to the end of the first century A. D., steeped in the Gospels, suggesting that those were already of widespread and settled authority. Two ways are presented to us: one of life, the other of death. “Now the Way of Life is this: first, love the God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself.” Easy to say, if you’ve heard it a hundred times, but the “nations” to whom the apostles preached had not heard it at all. What Greek would get it into his head that he had to love Zeus? Praise, yes; fear, sure; but love? You were supposed to be decent to your countryman, but to go so far as to love your enemy? Odysseus didn’t do that, and I daresay that Homer’s audience would have been much disappointed had the long-absent king with his son and his few faithful friends not slaughtered all the suitors and hanged the maidservants who had colluded with them.

But it isn’t as some mere moral code that the Teaching is presented. It is a Way to travel, enabled by Christ, opened up by the wondrous and unmerited grace of God. It is thus also a way of knowing, and not of special secrets in some hugger-mugger society with odd handshakes and narcotics. It is a way of allowing the Father, through the Son, to send the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to eternal truth — and this truth is to be shouted from the housetops to all who have ears to hear.

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Reverend Tucker composed his hymn with these prayers in mind, from the Didache, prayers to be spoken or sung before and after the Eucharist. I’ll put in boldface the parts he adapted. Read the prayers, and then see what somebody who knew what he was doing could compose from them!

We thank thee, our Father, for the holy Vine of thy servant David, which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus Thy Son: to Thee be the glory unto the ages.

We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and the knowledge which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus thy Son: to Thee be the glory unto the ages.

As this broken bread was scattered over the hillsides, but when gathered up became one, so may Thy Church be gathered up from all the far corners of the earth into Thy Kingdom. For Thine is the glory and the power, through Jesus Christ, unto the ages.

We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy Name, which Thou hast made to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and the faith and the immortality which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus Thy Son: to Thee be the glory unto the ages.

Thou, Lord and Ruler of all, hast created all things for Thy Name’s sake, and hast given food and drink to men for their delight, and that they may thank Thee; but us Thou hast graced with spiritual food and drink and life everlasting, through Thy Son. But first of all we thank Thee because Thou art mighty: to Thee be the glory unto the ages.

Remember, Lord, thy Church, deliver her from every evil, bring her to perfection in Thy love, gather her up into one from the four winds, and sanctify her in Thy kingdom which Thou hast prepared for her. Thine is the power and the glory unto the ages.

May grace come, and may this world pass! If anyone is holy, let him come forth; if not, let him turn from his ways. Marana tha! Amen.

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Father, we thank thee who hast planted
Thy holy Name within our hearts;
Knowledge and faith and life immortal
Jesus thy Son to us imparts.
Thou, Lord, didst make all for thy pleasure,
Didst give man food for all his days,
Giving in Christ the Bread eternal;
Thine is the power, be thine the praise.

Watch o'er thy Church, O Lord, in mercy,
Save it from evil, guard it still,
Perfect it in thy love, unite it,
Cleansed and conformed unto thy will.
As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,
Was in this broken bread made one,
So from all lands thy Church be gathered
Into thy kingdom by thy Son.

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reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

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