Remember All the People

Percy Dearmer, 1929

In celebration of the three-year anniversary of Word & Song, we are extending our special on new paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions.
THS WEEK ONLY

How can you have a Hymn of the Week when the word for the week is silly?

“Don’t get me started!” you might say, and point to all kinds of clumsy or overstrained or ridiculous lyrics in contemporary hymns. “Loud boiling test tubes!” is one of my favorites. The author, whom I won’t name, really did mean well, attempting to have all the works of man praise God, but, for one thing, you don’t boil things in a test tube, and they aren’t loud. Good poetry really does have to be grounded in reality. Or I could go to the opening words of “Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit!”, which are, ahem, “Silence, frenzied, unclean spirit!” Again, the author meant well, but the words are a twisted mouthful, and the use of “frenzied” as the first adjective here is a real stumbler. It doesn’t get much better as the verse goes on.

Clumsiness isn’t silliness, nor is stupidity, or creepiness, or heresy, or narcissism — no, I want something that’s not pretentious, that’s innocent in spirit, and if it might unwittingly raise a forgiving laugh. And I think I’ve got it: “Remember All the People,” otherwise known as “Far Off Lands,” by Percy Dearmer. Over summers in Canada, Debra and I often sing hymns, working our way through a collection of hymnals. When we first came upon this one, we burst out laughing! (And we were very glad we hadn’t first discovered in in church!) We’ve since become fond of it, for just this silly reason.

To clarify, Percy Dearmer was by no means a silly man. We owe to him a great debt of gratitude for his emphasis on beauty in worship, and for his work, with Ralph Vaughan Williams, in producing and editing the great English Hymnal, with Tunes, 1933, which involved his retrieval of many an old English Christmas carol about to fall into oblivion, and many folk melodies that had never been transcribed, and many liturgical chants and litanies from the medieval English tradition. And he wasn’t just an aesthete. He was energetically involved in political action for the poor and for laborers, as witness his running a canteen for them out of Westminster Abbey when he served as canon there — in charge of the music and the bread, not a bad combination.

It’s just that when Dearmer came to write poetry, it was hit or miss. Sometimes he’s all right; but sometimes he hits a sour note. I think here of the old Andy Griffith Show, and the lovable little popinjay deputy, Barney Fife, singing in the town choir, and nobody can hurt his feelings and tell him that he’s like a bluejay with a bad cold, but they’ve got to do something about it, so they station a baritone farmhand backstage with a microphone — you get the idea. So here we go with our hymn. Dearmer, himself an Anglican minister, wrote it for the missions. Nowadays, I guess, people would accuse him of being some sort of cultural imperialist, but just as he wanted to bring the word of God to the poor in England, and to preserve beloved carols and melodies that had escaped the attention of the well-heeled and well-educated, so too he wanted to bring the word of God to everyone all the world over. Some people bring food and medicine — and we have no problem with that; but the word of God is the ultimate in food and medicine.

Anyway, there are two very silly lines here that Dearmer wrote with complete lack of guile; but they are silly, both guileless and unintentionally ridiculous. Have you ever, at a Sunday service, sung a song that made you think of apes frolicking in the trees? This one will! Or have you sung a song that made you scratch your head and say, “Now, wait a second, what’s a camel doing in a rice paddy?” You will today, if you sing along with this hymn! But as I said, the laughter here is sympathetic and mild, and besides, what Dearmer prays for is good indeed. And the final stanza is just right.

We were not too surprised that there is no sung version of this hymn available online. You’ll see from the artwork above, that this hymn is now used (if at all) mainly for singing with children, and the more pity that, for us grownups, who have lost the ability to tolerate a little silliness now and again. The full lyrics — and they are both profound and childlike — are included in the video so you can sing along. If you do, AND if you chuckle, that’s just fine. For the serious message of the hymn still applies, for young and old, alike. — Debra

Remember all the people
Who live in far off lands,
In strange and lonely cities,
Or roam the desert sands,
Or farm the mountain pastures,
Or till the endless plains
Where children wade through rice-fields
And watch the camel trains.

Some work in sultry forests
Where apes swing to and fro,
Some fish in mighty rivers,
Some hunt across the snow.
Remember all God's children
Who yet have never heard
The truth that comes from Jesus,
The glory of his word.

God bless the men and women
Who serve him oversea;
God raise up more to help them
To set the nations free,
Till all the distant people
In every foreign place
Shall understand his kingdom
And come into his grace.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To receive our new posts, please join us as subscriber. Use one of the green buttons in this post to get our forever-discount rate of 30% off the regular subscription price.

Note: Paid subscribers have unlimited access on demand to our full archive of over 1,000 posts; our most recent posts remain available to all for several weeks after each publication. We think of the Word & Song archive as a little treasure trove, and we hope that our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one good thing at a time — the beautiful and the true!