#625: Come, We That Love the Lord
Jan. 23rd, 2020 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lutheranhymnsThe text here is an interesting collaboration between 16-1700s era Isaac Watts (British, super prolific, we'll run into him again) and Robert Lowry (US, 1800s, we'll run into him too.) Shannon density is somewhat low in that lines three and four are the same every verse, ditto five and six, and of course the refrain is a refrain. This isn't unheard of for Watts--think of "and heaven and nature sing" repeating in "Joy to the World." But it comes off as less impressive here, where the overall vibe tends towards the cheesy old-fashionedish.
"The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields" is an interesting mental image. Usually we don't think of heaven as having tiers or levels of awesomeness, or indeed tasty foodstuffs, but then there are lots of descriptions of "Pilgrim's Progress" (or maybe Dante's journey applies here as well?) that introduce a lot of complicated metaphors into how different writers have seen God's kingdom. So maybe this is just following in that tradition.
"The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields" is an interesting mental image. Usually we don't think of heaven as having tiers or levels of awesomeness, or indeed tasty foodstuffs, but then there are lots of descriptions of "Pilgrim's Progress" (or maybe Dante's journey applies here as well?) that introduce a lot of complicated metaphors into how different writers have seen God's kingdom. So maybe this is just following in that tradition.
