#816: Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life
Dec. 20th, 2020 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lutheranhymnsNice use of Shannon density, the repetition makes the text more "interconnected." The "way, truth, life" triplet is from the Gospels, referring to Jesus; in the second verse, Jesus is "light, feast, strength," which is expanded on as "such a light that shows a feast." And the last verse is "joy, love, heart," tied together with "such a heart as joys in love."
The musical composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, is famous for other things. And the text composer, George Herbert, is also famous for other things, if by other things you mean "poems about Christianity from the 1600s." When I was taking an intro poetry course in college the professor/academy culture in general was like "don't worry, we can be secular here, it's fine if you don't know any of these religious allusions, like don't worry about it," and I was like "...I kind of have the opposite problem" but then, he made a big exception for George Herbert. "George Herbert wanted to make sure that his poem 'Love' was at the end of the collection! After stuff like 'Death' and 'Heaven' or something! That's probably significant! You could cross-reference the phrases it namedrops and see if any of them are titles of his other stuff! That would also be significant! George Herbert!" So that was kind of an amusing exception to the rule.
The musical composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, is famous for other things. And the text composer, George Herbert, is also famous for other things, if by other things you mean "poems about Christianity from the 1600s." When I was taking an intro poetry course in college the professor/academy culture in general was like "don't worry, we can be secular here, it's fine if you don't know any of these religious allusions, like don't worry about it," and I was like "...I kind of have the opposite problem" but then, he made a big exception for George Herbert. "George Herbert wanted to make sure that his poem 'Love' was at the end of the collection! After stuff like 'Death' and 'Heaven' or something! That's probably significant! You could cross-reference the phrases it namedrops and see if any of them are titles of his other stuff! That would also be significant! George Herbert!" So that was kind of an amusing exception to the rule.
