lutheranhymns | Entries tagged with second person woes

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The music composer's name is Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, which is pretty impressive. All the alliteration points!

We also get a good amount of "feminine rhymes as disguised masculine ones," starting with the titular sadness/gladness (and it repeats in verse two). "Living"/"cleaving" is an impressive stretch--this is "cleave" in the sense of "cling to," not "cut apart from." The context makes it obvious, thankfully, we wouldn't want to be cleaving (to) Jesus in the second sense.

This isn't part of a cohesive mini-section, but it's yet another adaptation of Psalm 23, which as I've mentioned is not too long so you can stretch it out verse-by-verse. There are some second-person issues; to get the feminine rhymes to be consistent, you have to use rhymes like "leadeth/feedeth," "bestoweth/floweth," and then the other verses are like "beside me/guide me," "sought me/brought me," "never/forever" (twice).

The tenor/alto crossover is one of those things that I would not have expected to start tracking at the beginning of this blog, and yet keeps showing up with surprises. Towards the end of the third line, the tenors and altos overlap, okay. Then on the last chord of the line, the basses and altos overlap on middle C, and the tenors and sopranos overlap on the E-flat above it. Crossover action!

Meanwhile, on hymns in the wild, I was at an indoor service today where we sang hymns as a group for the first time since the pandemic hit here. But the selections were pretty different than the Lutheran books we're using; I get the feeling that both "In the Garden" and "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" are pretty popular in some traditions, but neither show up in the ELW (or its main predecessors), and I get the feeling some of my associates would dismiss them as "too cheesy/sentimental." (This may be just me trying to work out my ambivalence. But hey, it's been over a year, I'm ready to sing whatever!)

We get some Jesus=Proper Nouns here with Sun, Power, Ruler, Heart. It also probably qualifies as second person problems, rhyming "heart" with "thou art" (twice) and having lots of "thou"s.

The text is based on an Old Irish prayer that was translated into English in the early 1900s. Along with a translator, we have a "versifier" credited, who arranged it into an English poem! (If somewhat anachronistically given all the "thou" stuff.)

Yes, my choir also did an arrangement of this one, a lot of it was a soprano solo though.

Tenor part is high, large tenor/bass gaps.

Lyric-wise, this song is pretty great. Stars, mountain grandeur, power throughout the universe! There's a line that's currently translated as "all the works thy hand hath made," that occasionally shows up as "all the worlds thy hand hath made," which is even cooler. Archaic second person stuff, obviously, but overall cool. And popular, it seems to be well-known and liked. Except, maybe because of the archaic second person stuff or maybe some other reason, I wasn't at all familiar with this one growing up. One day we sang it at church and I was like "I'm not familiar with this one, it's great!" My mom (the pastor): "yeah, it's pretty popular! We sing it a lot at funerals." My dad: "except then, it's How Great Thou Wert." My mom: "hey!"

Another for the Psalm 23 mini-section. My choir did a version of this which was pretty straightforward, but had a cool cello accompaniment.

For a text like this, every arrangement is closely related, but sometimes slightly different things will stand out in different texts. In this one, I like how "you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies" turns into "your hand, in sight of all my foes, does still my table spread." The parenthetical-ness of "in sight of all my foes" to me seems to emphasize how God is almost spiting or taunting the enemies.

Since that line is originally in the second person, it shouldn't be a surprise that this version is as well. What's interesting is that the original text was originally in an old-timey dialect: "My shepherd doth supply my need, most holy is his name." Reworking it to second person solves both the sexism and the "doth" issues!

-There are a couple different versions of this translation. A slightly older one starts out "Thee We Adore, O Hidden Savior, Thee." Which, I think "hidden savior" is an interesting mental image, but having to stick the "thee" in there twice is a stretch. This version avoids the second person problems by going with "God most true," rhyming with "anew."

-While trying to look up when I came across the other translation, I found this note that I'd completely forgotten about from a couple years ago.

We also worked on a tricky arrangement of "Thee We Adore, O Hidden Savior," and [the director] said "this is like three times harder than I expected." And the woman next to me quietly says "That's because it's dumb."

When even the other altos are complaining, you know it's bad.

-Both the composer and translator are famous for other things, Thomas Aquinas was a prominent 1200s theologian, and Gerard Manley Hopkins was an 1800s poet who wrote sonnets and stuff about Christianity. This should be exactly up my alley, as someone who loves both formal poetry and takes Christianity seriously. It was...not. It's like: "God made the animals! The animals are so beautiful! Yay." One of my poetry professors pointed out that his stuff is also kind of humorless, so maybe that's it--I need to be wry about things on some level.

This is a case of second person problems. Specifically, for the rhymes, we have both tree/thee and see/thee, but also givest/livest, which is the "thou" form...and another way to turn masculine rhymes into feminine ones. But just in general, I feel like by the 1860s most people weren't saying stuff like "thou reignest" or "thine angels" even if they weren't stretching for a rhyme. So yeah, this does come off as one of those "unnecessarily old-timey" ones, though I recognize as with everything else there's a balancing act in throwing together different eras and genres into one volume.

Render/splendor is a nice rhyme.

The text has gone through an interesting culture war/second person editing process. The first verse has the nice feminine rhyme "tether/together." Cool. The second verse originally had "gather" and "Father," as in "God the Father." For one, this doesn't even rhyme, and for another, it's kinda sexist. So they swapped it to "gather/giver," which...rhymes even less well. ("Gather" could go with "tether" or "together" again!)

And then in the third verse, the masculine rhyme scheme was originally "thee, be, faithfully." "thee" had to get swapped to "you." "Be" was an easy fix, they just changed the word order from "...true disciples be" to "be disciples true." And then "thee faithfully" got swapped to "with faith anew." Still pretty decent by translation standards, just an odd journey.

Also, in the bass line, there are some small (optional?) notes--when the melody is holding a whole note, a couple times it looks like it's saying "you could hold this for only three beats and then drop an octave down." I assume that's just for piano rather than bass singers, because that feels pretty unnecessary.

This is a case of the archaic "my" + vowel = "mine" formula. Composer is Ralph Vaughan Williams, who gets around.

Pretty consistent approach to feminine rhymes--all of the two-syllable ones are -ing words. However, there's surprisingly little of the matching verb stuff: "consuming/illuming" is verb/verb, but kind of over-the-top since "illuminating" is much more common. "clothing" is a noun (and in this context "loathing" might also be); ditto "dwelling," which rhymes with "telling." So they mix it up a little.

Not a lot going on here--this is a "second person woes" case because we need the rhyme "be/thee" twice! It's not quite "last verse same as the first" because only the rhymes are repeated, but still not a whole lot of originality.

"receive/give" is audacious as a rhyming pair, I'll put it that way.

The left hand (tenor/bass part) is odd, at one point it has a chord that's C sharp against B flat. It gets a little weird because technically there are a bunch of different ways to write anything in musical notation, but the short version is, it's not very common to have both sharps and flats in the same place at the same time.

This is the other version of the "8/2 but with triplets" tune from here. We get some amazing redundancy in verse 2 with "breathed thine own life-breathing breath." As opposed to, uh, the other kind.

The first four verses are written in the middle of the staff, with a couple more tacked on at the end. Usually this is just because they ran out of room and wanted to save space. Interestingly (I mean, by my standards), here the first four all have the same chorus, which is mostly but not entirely trailing alleluias. Verse 5 is similar but a little different, and then verse 6 is very different. So only putting the first four with the music allows them to write that refrain only once, and then do the different versions.

This is a "second person problems" song with all the thees and thys. I forget if I've touched on it here (I think I probably have, although maybe not tagged), but generally, the pattern goes something like this:

I have a book
The book belongs to me
This is my book
The book is mine

You have a book
The book belongs to you
This is your book
This book is yours

(Second person intimate/close friend, back in the day)
Thou have a book (it's probably "hast," but let's not worry about verbs right now)
The book belongs to thee
This is thy book
The book is thine

So if the word that means "belonging to you" goes before the noun, it should usually be "thy." As in, "thy strong word." But then how do we get "thine own life-breathing breath" or "thine ordered seasons"?

Well, the other old-timey thing some writers kept doing was to add an "n" if the next sound would be a vowel, the same way we have "a book" but "an apple." So "thy" becomes "thine" for "thine own..." It also works with "my," as in "mine eyes have seen the glory."

Does the translation need to be so old-timey?

Some of it was written as late as 1983 so definitely not, but again, it's one of those cases where "thee" rhymes with "me" and that's a lot easier than "you"/[something].

Is it a little too cutesy-twee overall?

Probably. Apparently one of my mom's former colleagues really liked it so he kept putting it on the schedule but even she got tired of it.

What's the deal with Noah?

I mean, sometimes during/when discussing baptism we talk about different narratives that involve water (the Flood, the Red Sea, Jesus' baptism, the woman at the well) and link them to baptism in general. But in this context the cutesy "downy breast" stuff in contrast with "a flood that wiped out most of the world" is a little weird when you think about it.

"Pilot"?

From context this is about ocean navigation. Apparently this is a super old word for someone who steers a ship in dangerously shallow waters. (See also, Pirates of Penzance).

"Shoal"?

Shallow waters or sandbars. Apparently.

The old-timey pronouns?

This was written in the 1800s so it's really not that old, in the sense that using "thee" as an informal second-person pronoun wasn't super common, but it had a lot of traction in religious texts so some people kept it around in that context. In some cases, it's easy to "translate" them into modern English by just swapping "thee" for "you," but here it's difficult because "thee" is used to rhyme with "me" in some places.

I can only assume that the debate on which of these lyrics to keep/update/throw out the window was settled with brutal fistfights in the ELW editors' room. We'll probably see more of this later.

"Thee" is the informal second person pronoun? Like tú versus usted?

Yeah, in the King James translation (early 1600s) it was used as a form of intimate, familial address to God, but then that sort of disappeared from the language and it looks archaic and wrongly-formal.