I'm not too familiar with this hymn and I'm curious how/if there was a culture war argument over that title, I feel like there would be now if people were anthologizing. The second verse asks God's help to help the speaker change "the slow of heart" and direct "the wayward feet" to make prudent decisions--I feel like that echoes a lot of the tension in the "witness" section. Are we doing these things, or expecting God to do them through us?

The composer's name, "Washington Gladden," is pretty good. He and John Madden could be archrivals.

Nice 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.

Happy (liturgical) new year! This blog is two years old, and will probably wrap up in the coming year. I guess one good thing about lockdown is that it makes repetitive side projects a little more scheduleable...

This song is a Taizé-like repetitive chant with a repetitive bass part, with a five-flats key signature (very difficult for strings, not great for pianos, brass might be okay.) The melody ends on the second note of the scale, which is again one of those "not really major nor minor but restless/unsettled."

The image of a "seal" (in the sense of "royal stamp") might be borrowed from the Song of Solomon, I've seen it in a choir anthem before.

There's an interesting second-person update here. The original had "thee" everywhere, but the chorus changes it to "you" without problems; "we will be true to you till death." But the verse needs to keep it as "thee," to rhyme with "free."

Some of the culture-war bargaining can wait till next round, but a search suggests that even this version has already seen a lot of adaptations; the original verses were specifically about restoring/defending Catholicism in England and Ireland, so there were a bunch of verses about fighting for the specific brand of faith to prevail. So this one is more universally applicable.

We've seen this melody before but this one has a different harmonization; this version has a fairly boring alto part, but both of them have huge tenor/bass gaps (in slightly different places)!

Text-wise, we get Jesus as Guardian in caps, and an interesting swerve from plural to singular in the last verse: "you have promised to all who follow you, that where you are...your servant shall be." I would expect "servants" both to parallel with "all" and because "community rather than individual salvation" seems to be a popular theology, but that doesn't really fit with the "help me to lead my life well" themes of the rest of the song.

There are a couple hymns that are originally translations from French (Thine Is The Glory, Angels We Have Heard On High) but don't contain the original text. This one does, however. Rather than a translation by committee, it's a single translator but the original text was written by a group--the Catholic sisterhood "Les Petites Soeurs de Jésus," as well as "L'Arche Community," an organization that works with group homes and networks with people for intellectual disabilities. And according to Wikipedia, the founder of the latter was also recently found to be a serial sexual abuser, because 2020 didn't have enough going on. :(

The music composer does have an awesome name: Ahasuerus Fritsch. (Transliterated as Ahasverus on Wikipedia, I guess it's one of those where Latin isn't sure whether to call something a U or V.) The biblical Ahaseuerus was Esther's husband, I don't think he was ever a popular namesake but it's a great narrative.

Verse three is interesting, asking God for help not to speak too much/rashly, but to speak when we have to, but still be temperate in what we say, "lest I offend the weak." That sort of thing occasionally comes up in Paul's letters, like, "my faith is so strong I can even eat food sacrificed to pagan idols and not worry about it, but I choose not to, because it might concern people with weaker faith."

Weird enjambment (meter breaks not lining up well with grammatical breaks) in verse 2; "and bless whatever I have wrought" is its own idea, but "and bless" comes awkwardly at the end of one musical phrase (to rhyme with "success"), so they need a big dash before it to set off that clause.

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.

Are the altos getting lots of D?

Yes.

Why does it have so many lines?

I recognize that this is a fairly open-ended question, but bear with me. The first two lines are 8787 (syllable-wise). When a melody starts 8787 it's a good bet that it's going to continue with another 8787; there are twenty-something tunes that have that pattern, and several are used for more than one text.

But here, it continues 87...and then another 7, and then an 8, before finishing with 77.

How do the rhyme schemes play into that?

At first pretty impressively, but then it trails off. The middle 8778 part is trying to be an ABBA rhyme scheme (not like that), where the outside ones are feminine. So we get treading/bidding (okay), laughter/hereafter (nice), passion/heaven (???), and finally members/forever. (...?) It's another "translation by the then-new hymnal team" so nobody to credit/blame for the dropoff.

"Wean it"?

Yeah...so, the Earth is breastfeeding us, because...it's our mother...but we need to outgrow that stage and be wholly reliant on God rather than earthly distractions?

???

I mean, Paul does talk about dumbing the Gospel down so it can be "milk for babes" while keeping the more complex stuff on the level of "meat for men," but I don't really think that was what they were going for here.

"Prophet ecstasies"?

Joyful visions like they had back in the day. Also is attempting to rhyme with "skies," which is a nope.

Do you agree that that's too much to ask for?

I mean, personally, if I were asking God to metaphorically stop me from breastfeeding on Earth, I would probably be bold enough to ask for an angel visit and stuff too. This is a weird one.