Illuminations
How to Write a Hymn
by Anthony Esolen
In my May/June "Illuminations," I had the pleasure of dismembering a few contemporary hymns, if they can be said to have possessed sufficient coherence for dismemberment in the first place. But now I'd like to appeal to Christians who have an ear for verse and music, a heart for Scripture, and a sense of liturgical propriety. What has been done before can be done again. There's no good reason why we cannot have new hymns that work well as poetry, music, Scriptural meditation, and acts of worship. But they don't happen by good will alone. Let me make three recommendations for those who would write new hymns:
Poetic Meter
1. Become conversant with English poetry and English meter. Some songsters seem to think that a creative aura floating a few feet over the head and a knack for sort-of rhyming are enough to get them started. That's a little like saying that we should let you paint the walls of a church because you can name most of the colors in the big crayon box.
Poetry is an art; the raw stuff of the art is provided by your language. But you're no more an artist in language because you talk all day long than you are a musician because you whistle in the car. There's no way around it. You must steep yourself in English verse, and see—rather, hear—what centuries of artists have done with the sounds and shades and gleams and feints and glories of our words before.
Learn to recite, learn to hear the meters of Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Frost; and then hear what our hymn-writers and translators did on their own, after they had learned to appreciate the art of their betters. Listen to the last stanza of "Turn Back, O Man," by Clifford Bax:
Earth shall be fair, and all her people one:
Nor till that hour shall God's whole will be done.
Now, even now, once more from earth to sky
Peals forth in joy man's old, undaunted cry:
"Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!"
I don't know whether we'll see such a thing, not till Christ comes again, but the poetry here is nicely done. That's iambic pentameter, the most important of all meters in English poetry. Lest you think that the third and fourth lines are "wrong," because of the strong stress on the initial "Now" and the even stronger stress on "peals," when those syllables "should" be unstressed, hear the following lines:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
—Shakespeare, HamletBatter my heart, three-personed God; as yet
You do but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.
—Donne, Holy Sonnets
All of those lines are in iambic pentameter. Nor are there any exceptions or technical deviations. All are "heard" by the English ear as being in that meter and no other.
Learn the meters, especially the common ballad meters that make up so many of our folk songs and hymns. Learn what you can do to crowd a line with stress, or to let it flow as calmly as a gentle stream. Have a great time doing it. Read poetry again, real poetry and not cheap imitation stuff.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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