"Calon Lan"

Welsh Hymn

Yesterday, we introduced our new sometimes feature, Figuratively Speaking (a subset of our Word of the Week), with the expression “pull out all the stops.” When we say that someone “pulls out all the stops,” we mean that he has put his all, perhaps his whole heart, into doing something. And today we want to give you a great hymn that does just that, the Welsh Calon Lan, meaning The Clean Heart. The hymn’s refrain, if I translate it into English prose, means, “A clean heart is full of riches, and is fairer than the lovely lily; only the clean heart can sing, sing every day and every night.”

I’ve written, myself, a hymn set to this rousing and cheerful folk melody, for the big work of poetry I’m just about completing, The Twelve-Gated City. You can hear the tune also in a film we’ve featured here at Word and Song, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Ford used Calon Lan as a hymn sung for the wedding of Gwilym Morgan’s son Ivor to the lovely Bronwen — though the text doesn’t exactly fit what you’d expect for the occasion, since it doesn’t have to do with love or marriage. That didn’t matter to Ford, though, because he figured that almost nobody would understand the Welsh words, anyhow! Very different it was from the song he had the choir sing for the ominous wedding of Morgan’s daughter Angharad to the snobbish son of the owner of the coal mine. That was a minor-key hymn about the passion of Christ. Anyway, Calon Lan is perfect for a folk hymn, in this way: it does express the best that the folk of a certain culture wish for themselves — a clean heart — and the songs that spring up from that innocence.

We hope that this magnificent performance of Calon Lan by the incomparable Bryn Terfel and the Dunvant Male Choir will touch your heart. These men do the choral equivalent of what a great organist does at the end of a triumphal hymn. When they sing together, they pull out all the stops!

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Word & Song is an line 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 free or paid subscriber.