Bryn Calfaria (Calvary Hill)

William Williams (Pantycelyn)

When I go through my many old hymnals from all kinds of places and traditions, I am struck by the sheer variety in the best of them, the range of human feelings, the meditation on not only what is light and pleasant, but on the sorrows of this life — a fitting thing for our Word of the Week, melancholy. So you may have supposed I would come up with a song fit for such sorrow. If you do want such, I know none more directly honest than one we featured when we first started this project, "My Spirit Longs for Thee". And yet there are other moods fit for a minor key melody, and one of them, paradoxically enough, is that of awe before the majesty of God. Milton put it very well when he said that sometimes the Father shades the full blaze of his beams, “as with a cloud / Drawn round about Thee like a radiant shrine,” but even then the seraphim must shade their eyes, as the Father appears “dark with excess of bright.”

Our Hymn of the Week looks with awe not on the Father but on the Son, in his triumph on the Bryn Calfaria, the name for the melody of this mighty song: it’s Welsh for Calvary Hill (that f is pronounced as an English v). Its author is William Williams, whom we’ve featured here and here. He’s considered a giant in Welsh literature, known to the Welsh affectionately by the place where he was born, Pantycelyn, “Holly Vale.” Pantycelyn was a part of the Methodist revival in Wales, occurring at about the same time as in England and the United States. Most of his many books of poetry and his prose works are in Welsh, and are on the Christian faith and life, or on themes from Scripture.

The hymn itself consists of five stanzas, three of which you’ll hear sung below, in Welsh (I’ll give the Welsh and then a literal English translation below). In the first stanza, Pantycelyn prays that he may feel always the breeze coming from the bryn Calfaria, because only the blood of the Cross (Welsh, gwaed y Groes, pronounced gweid uh Groiss) can transform a weakling into a conqueror. In the second, the third in the original, he begs the Lord to take him as he is and to remake him, because even though his will is to keep far away, the Lord’s power alone can bring him near. In the final line, with stunning brevity and surprise, he says, “In your wounds” — and those words are repeated three times in the melody, before we ever get to the subject and the verb of the sentence — “alone will I be made whole,” Welsh iach, healthy, the final word of the stanza. Then in the last stanza, he says that this is the greatest work the Lord has ever done. He is still considering the hill of Calvary, but now as a mount of triumph. “You put death, you put hell, you put Satan under your feet,” Welsh dan dy droed (pronounced dahn duh droyd), he says, and concludes by affirming that this work will never leave his memory.

I’ve got two more things to say, and they both have to do with the singing you’ll hear. First, we’ve got a blue-ribbon Welsh male choir — Wales has long been famous for male choirs. The music for them is scored with two tenor parts, baritone, and bass. The effect is not of sweetness but of power, and that well fits this song. You can imagine the sound shaking the very walls of a church. We could use, I think, to hear such voices more often.

The second is that Pantycelyn’s stanzas, common in Welsh, call for a special kind of scoring by those who compose the melodies. The first four lines are in a meter common in English: eight syllables, iambic, rhyming on lines two and four. So you expect that lines five and six will either rhyme with each other, or that the last line will repeat the rhyme you already have. Nothing of it. The fifth line has only four syllables, with reversed rhythm, DUM-da DUM-da, and the sixth line has seven syllables, DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM, and it does not rhyme! We have nothing like that in English lyric poetry. Thus the final two lines are a departure from the first four, interpreting them, setting them in a surprising context, or soaring beyond them. But in order to make them really musical, the composers took to repeating them, like this: 5-5-5-6-6, with some of the choir moving on to the next line before the rest have finished it, and everyone coming together at the end. The result, I think you’ll agree, is tremendous in the old sense of that word: it makes you tremble.

Gwaed dy Groes sy'n codi i fyny,
  'R eiddil yn goncwerwr mawr:
Gwaed dy Groes sydd yn darostwng,
  cewri cedyrn fyrdd i lawr.
    Gad im deimlo
  awel o Galfaria fryn.

It is the blood of thy cross which lifts me up,
  makes the feeble into a great conqueror:
The blood of thy cross brings down
  a thousand mighty giants.
    Let me feel
  the breeze from the hill of Calvary.

Cymer, Iesu, fi fel 'rydwyf,
  fyth ni allaf fod yn well;
D'allu di a'm gwna yn agos,
  f'wyllys i yw mynd ymhell:
    Yn dy glwyfau
 bydda' i'n unig fyth yn iach.

Take me, Jesus, as I am,
  never can I be better;
You alone can bring me near,
  though my will is to go far away.
    In thy wounds
alone will I ever be whole.

Ymddiriedaf yn dy allu,
  mawr yw'r gwaith a wn'est erioed;
Ti ge'st angeu, Ti ge'st uffern,
  Ti ge'st Satan dan dy droed.
    Pen Calfaria
nac aed hwnnw byth o'm côf.

I will trust in thy might;
  in the greatest work thou hast ever done;
You put death, you put hell,
  you put Satan under your feet.
    Head of Calvary,
 never will this leave my memory.