#261: As the Dark Awaits the Dawn

[lutheranhymns]

I try not to overuse the "awesome texts" tag but Advent imagery is so great that a lot of them could qualify, this can be a representative of the genre. It's by Susan Palo Cherwien, who we've seen before, this time giving us phrases like "as the moon reflects the sun," "come dawn, or Sun of grace," "O lucent Morning Star." ("Lucent" being a sufficiently obscure/distinctive word that they picked it for the hymn tune!) I also think the repetition of phrases like "loving bright, loving bright" is a good case of lower Shannon density--because the un-repeated phrase is just three syllables long, it would sound weird amid lines of length 7 and 8, so doubling it to six makes it flow better.