As with all poetry, a hymn does not just say something: it is something. It exists as a shape, a form, a holding of experience within an artistic whole. It is not just a statement: it is something more profoundly affecting than a statement, a work of art. And art is more real than life: it removes the random and contingent, presenting us with the thought and emotion shaped, crystallised, unified, and universalised.

An Illustration⤒🔗

I begin with the third Lambeth Conference, held in 1888. It is recorded that at the confer­ence service in St Paul’s Cathedral, when ‘The Church’s one foundation’ was sung, the effect was ‘almost appalling’:

Sung by a large congregation, some people say that this hymn was really more than they could bear. ‘It made them feel weak at the knees, their legs trembled, and they really felt as though they were going to collapse.’ (Wesley Milgate, Songs of the People of God, p.154).

The great cathedral must have been packed with a large and distinguished congregation, rich with the sense of a great occasion. What their fear of imminent collapse draws atten­tion to is something that I think is generally overlooked in discussions of hymns, and that is the physical element. Hymns have often been treated as if they are just words on the page accompanied by notes. I want to argue for a dif­ferent perception of them, as physical things, with a presence and a form that depends in part upon that physicality. When a hymn is an­nounced in a service, the congregation stands up, listens, gives out breath, sound, notes: the hymn becomes something different from the thing on the page. It becomes a performed act, a creation of the body, the lungs and the blood. It gives the congregation a chance to do something, of course; but that something is a self-expression, literally, an ex-pressing of sound, loud or soft.

Mind and Body←⤒🔗

A hymn tune generally has a shape or form, which we follow when we sing. A tune such as Richmond, for example, has an opening arpeggio which is immediately striking, and then a climb in the third line – B, C, D, E – which imposes its own crescendo. Another tune such as St Magnus, divides the Common Metre (C.M.) verse into two halves: the first half has its own shape, and then the second half comes along and trumps it with the sudden octave lift on D in the final line. What I am suggesting is that these are felt shapes, lines following other lines, slurs, rests, beats, elements which the mind and body feel as pauses, rises, falls, front vowels, back vowels, rhythms. The 8.6.8.6. beat of Common Metre, which is based on the old ‘Fourteener’, is a metre which is felt as eight and six, eight and six, yet also (and I think simultaneously) as fourteen and four­teen, which is why C.M. stanzas so frequently get divided into two at the half-way mark.

Every metre is different, and every metre is felt differently, not by the mind alone, but by the singing body, the voice and breath. It is possible to draw on this physical sense to enhance the meaning of a hymn, and I think its interpretation also. Think of the shape of ‘Jerusalem the golden’, sung to Ewing, or ‘The church’s one foundation’ sung to Aurelia, in which the notes influence the shape of the words, make us feel the form of the verse almost palpably: ‘Jerusalem the golden’; ‘The church’s one foundation’. You could spoil a verse just by altering its shape and feel: you could ruin St Clement by playing it in waltz time, with an emphasis on the first beat of the three-beat bar. If you play it like that, the singer starts to feel it differently in his or her body. In the same way everyone knows that sometimes, just sometimes, a hymn – like any other piece of music – comes just right, words and music exactly paced and brought out fully and properly.

A Clear Pattern←⤒🔗

The singer of a hymn sees verses, spaced on the page, with patterns of thought running through the lines. The lines are individually important, and often very beautiful or arresting, because they fit so perfectly into the metre: ‘The spacious firmament on high’; ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’; ‘Light’s abode, celestial Salem’; ‘O thou who camest from above’; ‘Day by day we magnify thee’. But those lines connect with the lines that come after, and the art of the hymn, as with any other kind of poetry, is the relationship of the sense to the line, the line ending, and the succeeding line. The break at the end of the line can be managed in any number of ways, but it has a very important function:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the prince of glory died,

This opens with an adverbial clause of time, leading us to expect at some point a main clause to follow. But first we have a postpone­ment of that main clause. The second line continues the sense of the first line, carrying on the sentence with an adjectival clause within the adverbial one; then, and only then, comes the pause, signified by the all-important comma, which makes the moment at the end of the second line more marked than the one at the end of the first. That comma signals the end of the first half of the verse and the beginning of the main clause:

My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

There’s More to Come←⤒🔗

I do not want to make hymns just a matter of grammar and parsing, but to point out that the actual structure of the verse carries a particular kind of sentence, one in which the opening ‘When’ makes the singer expectant for the main verb – an expectation which is only satis­fied in line three. The mind takes in the first line and knows that it is in for a long haul. So it paces itself, allowing the text to unroll from line to line. Physically, the body and lungs take this in too: a singer knows that there is more to come at the end of the first line, and prob­ably takes a breath there. It is quite possible for a good singer – or even a moderate one – to sing the first two lines through without a breath, but it might lead to a big breath at the end of line two, which would be inappropriate. That comma asks for a breath that allows line two to end with a pause but also permits it to connect with line three.

Obviously this does not go through the singer mind consciously, but it is part of his or her response to the verse that is presented on the page. The result is an awareness, perhaps unconscious, of what is needed to sustain the sound and in sustaining the sound, hold the meaning. ‘O thou who camest from above’ is very similar in its patterning, leaving the main verb, ‘Kindle a flame’ to line three, where it is placed at the centre of the verse, looking back to the description of the Holy Spirit and forward to the mean altar of the human heart. It links heaven and earth, past and present; it is poised between the recollection in lines one and two of the miracle of Pentecost and the sense in lines three and four of the here and now, the present of the singing self.

Different Patterns←⤒🔗

This is quite different from ‘Light’s abode, celestial Salem’. Here the lines succeed one another and complement one another, add to one another: 1+1+1, with a slight variation in the middle:

Light’s abode, celestial Salem,
Vision dear whence peace doth spring,
Brighter than the heart can fancy,
Mansion of the highest King;

Line three is floating, a supplement to ‘Vi­sion dear’ perhaps, but also capable of being applied to any of the other three lines. It varies the pattern slightly, and very well, preventing it from becoming too mechanical. In this case, the mind and body are again waiting for the main verb, which comes in line five: ‘O how glorious are the praises’ (wonderfully helped by the tune). But before that the mind has gone through many different apprehensions: it has registered ‘Light’s abode’ and then had it de­fined as ‘celestial Salem’, then redefined as a ‘Vision’ and a vision of peace; then that vision is redefined as ‘Brighter than the heart can fancy’, and then described as a ‘Mansion’.

Clearly the mind is presented here with complex allusions, and that is part of the ef­fect of this verse: a good reader will know that Jerusalem signified a ‘vision of peace’, and that the word ‘mansion’ was associated with heaven – ‘In my father’s house are many man­sions’. But such processes are of the educated mind, eager to pick up the references: there is a deeper process that registers the physicality of the verse, its presentation of one image after another to produce a richness. It does so in lines that are incomplete, in that they have no verb, but which are complete units within the rhythm of the verse, except for line three, which depends on what went before or after. The singer can breathe after every line, secure in the knowledge that he has the energy for the next unit.

The Hymn Book lays it out←⤒🔗

The verse is placed in a hymnbook to allow an almost unconscious apprehension of these things. The singer looks at the shape of the verses on the page and responds accordingly; then looks at the shape and feel of the lines within the verses; then looks at the length of the hymn. All of these things are laid out, as if at a table. The singer can see the lines: he can see how they relate to the lines before and after. Then he can see the verse as a unit; then the white spaces between the verse; then the margins – he can see that which denotes the silence, the not-sung, that which marks it out from the sung.

Next, I think, we register the rhythm and metre: iambic, trochaic, anapaestic (‘For the might of thine arm we bless thee, our God, our fathers’ God’). Then there is rhyme, which is ex­tremely important in the singer’s perception:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

The lines are regular and iambic, but at the end of them comes the ABAB rhyme – cross­-died-loss-pride: the pleasure is in the sound, and also in the contrast, or sometimes the similarity, between the repetition of sound and the difference of meaning. And then, in the next verse, the poet obliges and does it again, until he says – ‘that is enough’:

Ready for all thy perfect will,
My acts of faith and love repeat,
Till death thy endless mercies seal,
And make my sacrifice complete.

The Completeness in a Hymn←⤒🔗

Here the rhyme words complement the mean­ing quite beautifully. The verse begins with an unexpected trochaic foot – ‘Ready’ – but then becomes regular iambic: the rhyme words ‘will’ and ‘seal’ are here subordinate to the second rhyme – repeat/complete. The idea is that if the fire on the altar of the heart has been lit, and continues to blaze – ‘with inextinguishable blaze’ – then the acts of faith and love will go on and on through life, until the end of it. Repeat the acts, repeat them, repeat them, until life – which has itself been a sacrifice – is complete. And the hymn is complete too.

The pleasure of such an art is in the form itself, perfectly used, the idea contained in the pattern of the verse. The words themselves and their meaning become part of the physi­cal activity of the hymn. It is no longer just a matter of the shape on the page, of the length of the line or the importance of the rhyme. The movement of the words themselves creates an awareness that is apprehended in part by the mind but in part by the sense of how it moves, on the page and in our bodies and brains. That awareness is conditioned by many things: tune, rhyme, imagery, metre, line, verse, vocabulary (for example, the use of polysyllables). In the middle of a line there can be a word of greater length and complexity: ‘Day by day we magnify thee’; ‘Take my life, and let it be/Consecrated, Lord to thee’; ‘They stand, those halls of Zion/Conjubilant with song’. The compilers of A&M resisted ‘Conjubilant’ for many years, printing ‘All jubilant’ until 2000 with Common Praise. They must have thought them too much of a mouthful for congregations; whereas the point is that encountering this word is a physical pleasure, something denser, more complex. It is not too difficult: it just gives the mind and body something to push against or grap­ple with. It yields with a bit of pressure, but stiffens the line.

The Might of Metaphors←⤒🔗

The metaphors and similes that I have been using are themselves physical. This is because so much of our mental and spiritual life is only to be described in metaphors. We are cared for, and we are saved; we are borne upwards and we are plunged in the depths; we are weary, we travel through the desert, we are pilgrims, we seek, we miss, we stumble. When we sing ‘In his hands he gently bears us’ we take up the position of a tiny child, borne in his father’s hands. Metaphors and similes such as these are everywhere in the depiction of the spiritual life: the fire of the Holy Spirit, the showers of blessing, the seal of love, the indwelling in the heart, the breath of God, the captivity of sin, the release from chains, the purging of sin, the love and care of the shepherd, the love of God as a father of his children.

Now if we put the physicality of these im­ages into the hymn form, we can see what a potent mixture it is. The act of singing itself is profoundly physical, as the singers in St Paul’s in 1888 found out; the form itself is a physical thing, taking religious experience and shaping it; and the words themselves not only have a shape within the lines and verses but they also carry the metaphors and similes, which take us back into our physical lives to describe our spiritual ones. The combination is extremely powerful, and it works at a level that is hard to explain because it is beyond logic or explana­tion. Nothing is more infuriating than the person who dismisses a hymn on the grounds that it is not modern in its language, or does not fit some theological criterion, or who dismisses the whole business of hymn-singing itself on the grounds that it is somehow outmoded. The hymn exists in a world that is far more interest­ing and more profound than that.