Illuminations
A Whole Poem
Anthony Esolen
Whenever I recommend the poetry of Christian hymns, and in doing so cast a cold eye on the incompetence and sloppy sentimentality of much of what we sing in our churches today, someone will accuse me of being an "elitist," as if that were a fit response to end all discussion. I typically reply in three ways.
First, I say that my friend has evaded the issue. If he wants to defend the art of a Marty Haugen or David Haas, let him do so, on the same grounds whereby we judge the worth of any poem, sacred or no. Then I remind him that all human cultures have had traditions of poetry—songs—handed down over the generations, beloved alike by old and young, rich and poor, men and women, whether the people were literate or not. We are the strange beings with no poetry in our souls. Finally, I ask him to turn to another art. Would he show the same indifference if an incompetent were to cover the walls of his home with paintings? Would he open his wallet for ugly and awkward furniture? If not, why the carelessness with poetry, with its peculiar power to enter the soul and to form it for good or bad?
I do know one of the reasons why. People in American churches don't think much about poetry, just as Libyans don't think much about igloos. They are as likely to read one good poem in a year as a Bedouin herdsman is to go ice fishing. That is a shame, and quite unnecessary; it is a lot easier to bring a good poem to an American congregation than to ship walruses on ice to Tripoli.
But would they know a good poem when they heard one? Perhaps not. We are too used to singing only a part of a poem, leaving off the last stanzas. That results in more than incompleteness. It gives people the sense that there never was anything to be complete or incomplete at all, only a series of related sentiments, to be cut short as you will. You can't intend to hurt the work of art when you don't know that there was a work of art to hurt in the first place. Everything is anticlimactic. But then, why should we build to a climax, when we're all right as we are?
Our Trouble
Here, though, is a poem that must be sung to its end, because otherwise it would make no sense, and because it asserts that we are not all right as we are, so that if we stop short, we leave ourselves where we do not want to be. It is Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove, by Isaac Watts. The poem is in Common Meter, so you may sing it to any one of hundreds of melodies, but the old Methodist Hymnal (1939) sets it to the sprightly St. Martin's, an unusual but I think effective choice. In the first stanza, we praise the Holy Spirit and beg him to come to us, setting forth our trouble in one little word:
Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all thy quickening powers;Kindle a flame of sacred love
In these cold hearts of ours.
Well done, Dr. Watts. We ask to be quickened: to be brought to life. We ask the Spirit to kindle that sacred love, because on our own we do not have it. Our hearts are cold: the adjective alliterates with quickening and kindle, and that makes it seem the more isolated, out of order. Imagine ending the song here!
The second stanza explains why we are so cold, and how the chill is manifest:
Look how we grovel here below,
Fond of these earthly toys;Our souls, how heavily they go
To reach eternal joys.
It is not, here, that we aren't cheerful enough with our neighbors. It is that our whole orientation is wrong. We grovel here below. Grovel, for what? For whatever on earth pleases us—mere toys, the trifling, the petty, the nugatory. It may be gold, or land, or rank, or a prize cow, or to be chosen first soloist at Emmanuel Lutheran, or to win a seat in the senate, or to win a five-hundred-dollar kitty with a pair of nines and a steely gaze, or to capture the good opinion of people you don't really like—things to live and die for, truly. Mud pies, cardboard, tin.
Our Effort
We should make an effort to live and die for the higher things. So we do:
In vain we tune our formal songs,
In vain we strive to rise;Hosannas languish on our tongues,
And our devotion dies.
The Christian life, for most of us, is not a continuous climb, or a sudden translation from earth to heaven. God in his wisdom will not have it so. We may ascend with strong legs and willing hearts from the lowlands of sin to the first tableland of our purification. And the next mountain looms before our eyes, apparently much closer than it is, and we walk, and walk, and do what we think is our best, and still we feel we are not one inch closer to heaven.
Such is our condition. It would be an end to a poem of despair, but the way is not ours to determine, and the strength to traverse it is not ours to confer upon ourselves. So Watts turns from that condition to ask whether it must always be so:
And shall we then forever live
At this poor dying rate?Our love, so faint, so cold to thee,
And thine to us so great!
The question as the poet poses it answers itself. If it were up to our love, we would continue in our dying sort of life, paltry and faint. But it is not up to us. The love of God does more than demand a fit answer from us. It gives us the very strength to make that answer. If our love for God is a cold return for his love, then we pray the more fervently for more of his love.
Our Appeal
So Watts returns to his first stanza, making the same appeal as before, but in terms that clearly show how that appeal may alone be satisfied:
Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all thy quickening powers;Come, shed abroad a Savior's love,
And that shall kindle ours.
The first two lines are exactly the same as in the first stanza, but now we hear the urgency in the request. We are dead without God's love. We can be brought to life by our Savior alone. His is the bonfire that lights our candles.
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a whole poem.
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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