#868: Isaiah in a Vision Did of Old

[lutheranhymns]

This is a Martin Luther original, and is pretty wild, even though it's just paraphrasing a few lines of the book of Isaiah. The "Holy, Holy, Holy" song attributed to the angels is often incorporated into the Communion liturgy--the Rule of Three is applicable here, three holies are cooler than two or four. Although this is "peculiar meter," it almost works as a sonnet (fourteen-ish lines of ten), I like sonnets so I noticed this.

When my choir was practicing this I, as the vocab nerd, got picked on to be asked "what's a lintel?" (It's a doorframe.) And then everyone else's question was "what's going on with this song?" One of the guys answered "I think Isaiah was tripping on the good stuff," and that's been my association with it ever since.