Illuminations
What Was Done Before
by Anthony Esolen
For several years I've been delighted to write in this column about the beauty, the liturgical propriety, the scriptural profundity, and the sheer might of the great hymns of the Church. Yet once in a while someone asks me whether I think that the only good art is the old. Why can't we have good things now? Have people become incapable of writing hymns, just because they were born too late?
I don't believe so. What was done before can be done again.
That said, I think we are apt to underestimate how much of the cultural foundation has crumbled away, and therefore how much we must painstakingly repair, just to put a dry roof over a moribund form of art. When the Wesleys wrote their hymns, they had in the storehouses of their minds hundreds of English poems in a wide array of metrical forms. Many of those poems were original hymns or paraphrases of the psalms, such as we find in the Scottish Psalter. The Wesleys also thought in Christian ways; without squinting, they could see St. Paul in Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount in Genesis. They were standing on the shoulders of giants; or rather, they were standing on the parapets of mountaintop castles that giants had built, and they had accustomed their eyes to long vistas and the unobstructed heavens above.
They also had inherited a tradition of sacred language, given them by the King James translation and the Book of Common Prayer, so that they knew both how to speak of God and how their readers would expect them to speak. They could hear and feel the difference between the language of prayer and the language of haggling over a bill at the public house. They could, without trouble, find words that were redolent of Scripture, and they could use them without apology or embarrassment. They could turn phrases in ways that sounded more like the psalms than like common English, and nobody would be confused or irritated by it. So could all their fellow hymnodists. The titles alone bear witness: "Come, Ye Disconsolate"; "Pleasant Are Thy Courts Above"; "Here, O My Lord, I See Thee Face to Face"; "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise."
We no longer have that tradition, or that language, or even the shared rhythms of English poetry. We are like people who are trying to build a house without -knowledge of lumber or stone. There is nothing for it—we must acquire the knowledge, and build, poorly enough at first, but what else can be done?
Points to Follow
So I submit here for your consideration a hymn, fit for the season of Epiphany and shortly thereafter. I've tried to follow my own advice in several respects.
First, before you write a word, choose the melody, and choose it because it will fit the tone and the spirit of the hymn you wish to write. I've chosen the minor-key melody picardy, with its haunting four-note run near the end of the penultimate line, a line of musical suspense and crisis, and therefore appropriate for concentrated thought and passion.
Second, you have to determine not to cheat with rhymes or meter. I don't mean that all rhymes have to be exact—that is not a part of the English tradition; we do allow good to rhyme with flood. But we do not allow good to rhyme with go, did, rolled, grew, said, and so on. We also allow the elision of unstressed medial vowels, in certain circumstances, pronouncing power as one syllable, deliverance as three. But if you have to cheat by turning a quarter note into two eighth notes because you stuck an extra syllable in one of your lines, well—scratch it out and do it over.
Third, you have to come to terms with linguistic change. I do not say that you have to capitulate to it. The psalms themselves were written in a Hebrew that nobody at the time spoke. But there's a difference between using the old intimate pronouns thou and thee, which are readily understood and are still used in prayers that even children learn, and using the archaic verbal endings -est and -eth, or other forms that have gone completely out of use, such as the past tenses brake, sware, spake, and so forth. You can take some liberties with word order, but in that regard, too, you will have to give up some things: no line such as when the just are mercy needing can now pass.
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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