"As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams"

Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, 1696

Our Hymn of the Week is one of the most moving of all the psalms, the forty-second, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,” set into English verse by Nahum Tate and Dr. Nicholas Brady, an Anglican bishop. Tate and Brady were a couple of Irishmen with a turn for poetry, and a real sense that the best way for English speakers to sing Hebrew poetry would be for them to sing it as English poetry. So they collaborated in doing just that for all the psalms, among which is our hymn, “As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams.”

Once, I was with my family at St. John Lateran, in Rome, and we were looking at a glorious mosaic, in which were pictured, among other wonderful things, some deer sipping at the water of a rushing brook. A nearby tour guide said, in English, that the deer symbolized the apostles, but that wasn’t true, I told my children. They were the deer in the psalm, refreshing themselves — and so they represented all of us, because we are like those deer, as with the psalmist we say, “My soul thirsts for God, the living God.” I’m far from alone in loving that psalm almost the best of all. Saint Augustine echoes it all the time, especially when he thinks about what he was as a young man, when he did not know God, but he longed to, and he was caught up in both error and sin. Handel wrote a fine oratorio from the psalm, using Tate’s and Brady’s first line as his own. And for sheer polyphonic sweetness, what can compare with Palestrina’s Sicut cervus? But we don’t need the great ones for this hymn. An old Scottish folk melody, “Martyrdom,” will do — will be quite perfect, in fact, as I trust you will hear.

And why shouldn’t the poem be sweet? The psalmist isn’t surrounded by people who wish him well. No, he has enemies, people who scoff at him, saying, “Where is your God?” And sometimes he feels as if all the waves of the ocean are washing over his head, as “deep calls unto deep.” But still he will not give in. He chastises his own soul, saying, “Why are you cast down?” Why, indeed? “Hope in God,” he says to his soul, twice, and give Him praise, because He is still “the health of my countenance, and my God.” Thirst, indeed — more urgent than hunger, and sweeter, immediately and purely, when you take that first fresh drink. Without God, where’s the hope? All is a desert, and all the works of man will one day be no more than dust in the wind. But there are the true and sacred streams of water, springing up into eternal life. Let us go and drink!

Don’t miss this beautiful recording of “As Pants the Hart” by The Priory Singers, of Belfast.

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As pants the hart for cooling streams
When heated in the chase,
So longs my soul, O God, for Thee,
And Thy refreshing grace.

For Thee, my God, the living God,
My thirsty soul doth pine:
O when shall I behold Thy face,
Thou Majesty Divine!

Why restless, why cast down, my soul?
Hope still, and thou shalt sing
The praise of Him who is thy God,
Thy health's eternal spring.

To Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
The God whom we adore,
Be glory, as it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.

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