Rules for Rhymes
This once, dear readers, I'm going to do something I promise not to do again. I will look at one of my own hymns, written for Lent, from The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2019).
I do so not to boast. It's just that I have become aware that people with good intentions are attempting to write genuine and orthodox hymns, rather than the staggeringly awful stuff that spreads its rot from contemporary hymnals into the brains of those congregants who like it or who put up with it, while others, irritated or embarrassed or bored, fall away.
How do you write a hymn? What is poetically permissible in our time? What special features must a hymn possess that a lyric poem in general need not possess?
Such questions do not admit of a dogmatic answer. With this art as with any, we feel our way. Some vetoes we may assert with confidence, just as, whatever we may choose for a formal banquet, mud pies and dead rats will not be on the menu. The text must be grammatical (goodbye, Catholic editors who mangled "Of the Father's Love Begotten" and "For All the Saints" and many more old poems whose grammar you evidently did not understand). The text must be orthodox (goodbye, "We Are the Bread of Life," with all your self-celebrating brethren). The text must be intelligent, not dumb or mantra-like (goodbye, most praise-and-worship songs).
English songs almost always rhyme. You must do so also. But unless you are writing comedy (think of Tom Lehrer, rhyming don't shade your eyes with plagiarize) you don't want to call attention to it. Rhymes should feel easy, not labored. Full rhymes are best, but a few old near-rhymes that English poets have always used are yours to use also, especially if the visual resemblance assists: good, food; God, blood; noise, rejoice. But avoid mere assonance, because it will stick out, like the screech of a violin bow almost drawn right across the string. Raise and day do not rhyme. Seek and feed do not rhyme.
Grammar & Meter
What about early modern English grammatical forms? Are they still alive for us? Some are, I think, and some are not. The second-person pronouns thou, thy, thine, and thee are alive for anyone who says the Lord's Prayer, and thine and thee are, for English hymns, indispensable. The dark back-rounded vowel of you sounds like a bassoon at the end of a song; it is much inferior to the bright front-unrounded vowel of thee. But the real advantage with thee and thine is, aside from their versatility for rhymes, that they form powerful pairs with me and mine. Consider these lines, from two well-known old hymns:
Take my will and make it thine;
It shall be no longer mine. ("Take My Will")Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on thee;
Leave, ah, leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me. ("Jesus, Lover of My Soul")
That there is a sacral coloring to those old pronouns is an advantage, not a fault.
But the -est and -eth verbal endings we must probably discard; -eth has become a feature of mockery, like the orthography of Ye Olde Shoppe. Similarly, we must discard most (but by no means all) inversions of ordinary word order, though inversions that are readily understood and that help to end sentences on the emphatic are ours to use still. Recall Howard Cosell's famous cry in the boxing match of the century: "Down goes Frazier, down goes Frazier!"
Your text must scan metrically, according to ordinary English poetic usage. No extra syllables allowed; no turning a quarter note into two eighth notes for one stanza. It's a cheat, and cheats call attention to themselves. A very few of the old classics are written in irregular meter. Christina Rossetti used it: "In the Bleak Midwinter." But you are not Christina Rossetti.
Don't assume that you can write a poem and then plug it into whatever melody meets its meter. That's backwards. Choose the melody first and write the poem with that melody in mind. The melody will restrain you. So much the better. What the melody stresses with long-held notes, you, too, should try to stress. Where the melody pauses, you, too, should try to pause. If the melody is solemn (Passion Chorale) or bright (Lasst Uns Erfreuen), your words should be also. Follow the melody.
Scripture & Theology
Since I was a boy, I've heard people in my church (Roman Catholic) praise the new jingles because they were often direct citations of Scripture. Sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren't, but it is not really to the point. Our ancient hymns were steeped in Scripture, but not naively; they brought motifs from many places, as Jesus did; they "saw" the New Testament in the Old, as did the author of Hebrews, who saw in the faith of Abraham upon Moriah a shadow of the ultimate self-gift of Christ upon Calvary. The hymn should teach us, rather than merely being an occasion for an effusion of feeling, tossed up with piety-salad.
Good hymns are profoundly theological, but the jargon of theology, or of sociology, or of contemporary politics, does not belong. No one sings about a committee meeting, unless for satire. In fact, no one sings the very word "committee," or "vicarious," "racist," "marginalized," and so forth. The language of songs is elemental: day and night, the stars and the sea, fire and water, life and love, sorrow and death. The Psalmist can teach us: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the sea, and all that is in it."
A good hymn will often tell a story, but whether it does so or not, it should have a narrative thrust to it, with a beginning, a middle, and an end; it should be going somewhere, with each stanza a stage to the next, until all find their resolution in the finale. Difficult, yes, but necessary.
The Offering
So then, here is my offering, on the Transfiguration. The texts I have in mind (Matt. 17:1–21; Mark 9:2–29; Luke 9:28–43) inspired Raphael's famous two-level painting, the lower level given to the account of the boy possessed by a spirit, whom the disciples of Jesus could not heal. Here are the ends to be achieved: Celebrate the Transfiguration. Shed light upon what it means for our ultimate hope. Tell both stories, the one above and the one below, and apply them to us who sing the hymn. Move from stanza to stanza, naturally, without disruption. Sum everything up in the last. Do so with language that is lucid, and easily sung to the melody chosen (Wareham):
O vision of the Anointed One,
Arrayed in raiment like the sun!
With Thee upon the cloudy peak
The radiant prophets come to speak.Thy flesh illumines, blinds the three;
One speaks, yet lost in wonder, he;
Then God's own voice in thunder's might
Bids them to heed His sole delight.We in the shadowed fields below
Have eyes, but find no way to go,
Can speak, but only rage and rave,
And none has power to raise and save.To us, resplendent Lord, descend,
To our gray night Thy radiance bend;
Our mists of madness, burn away,
And fold us in Thy robes of day.
I leave the singer to judge the song's success. But may what it prays be so!
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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