Hymns and Classical Poetry: Guest Post by Peter Pendleton

Peter Pendleton is an amateur writer and critic who might one day actually publish something. Until then, he reads, works, and contributes to  https://carlseepress.blog/ .  

Hymns and Classical Poetry by Peter Pendleton

Christian poetry is often—not always, but often—overlooked. When initially requested to write on classical poetry, I thought of writing on the entirety of Christian poetry, but the subject was too vast for the article. Thus, I have narrowed the subject to hymns. Hymns have the convenient function of being specifically intended for Christian worship, so are far more explicitly Christian than a normal poem. Few people also are aware of how many hymns were written by respected poets. My intention in this article is to overview a handful of these, analyze them, and, I hope, inspire others to read hymnals with more interest.

Before beginning, I should try to define hymns as different from devotional or even religious poetry. The easiest definition is anything in a hymnal. The second easiest is anything written specifically as a hymn, but that is trickier to determine. Obviously, there are things like The Olney Hymns which were purposely set forth to be a book for congregational singing, but the question becomes whether poets who might not have compiled or contributed to a hymnary still might have written a poem for the purpose of religious song. Most hymnals take the latter approach, so my definition, will rest on any poem more or less commonly used as a hymn by most churches. I will note, however, that I am not including Longfellow’s I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day, since that does not explicitly give praise to God or appeal to a congregational spirit; I would consider it a strongly Christian-themed Christmas song.  

The first poet I address is George Herbert, one of the most prominent of classical Christian poets, and whose body of work, published in The Temple, is entirely devotional poetry. However, very little of his poetry was meant to be sung, or is fitting for a church gathering. Much of it is intimate; most of it is concerned not with praise but with revealing a certain truth. However, there is one poem that he did specifically intend to be sung. Herbert titled it simply Antiphon, which means a responsive song. As congregational singing, it is superb. It clearly take inspiration from the Psalms, as the majority of hymns either explicitly or implicitly do, and has the typical Baroque command of rhyme that Herbert especially excels at—note how each rhyme is inevitable, yet its ideas are not predictable. The hymn as a whole is thoughtful without losing its praisal quality; it makes the casual churchgoer think, but not to distraction. The Baroquial parallelism in Verse (The heav’ns are not to high,/His praise may thither fly) is beautiful, as well as the theological echo of “But above all, the heart/Must bear the longest part.” It is a Master Poet trying his hand at hymnody, and getting its elements perfectly right.

That brings us ahead to Isaac Watts, one of the figureheads, along with Charles Wesley, of the “Golden Age of Hymnody.” Watts is generally ignored nowadays, but until the 20th Century he was highly respected (he is mentioned, in A Little Princess, in the same sentence as Shakespeare*), and is still unavoidable for scholars of poetry. Tellingly, he is included in The Norton Anthology of English Poetry while other hymnodists are excluded. Besides many other poems he wrote over 800 hymns, mostly published in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Watts uses the Post-Dryden style effectively, giving his hymns a sense of symmetry and balance. He commonly uses ABAB as his rhyme scheme, which gives the hymns a simplicity that fits to any tune in 4/4 meter. Not everything Watts writes is of high caliber, however. When I Survey the Wondrous Cross has the horrific lines “Then I am dead to all the globe,/And all the globe is dead to me.” But many have the quality I mentioned in Herbert’s Antiphon of being lightly profound. Watts often plays with form; Give to Our God Immortal Praise repeats the line “Wonders of grace to God belong,/Repeat his mercies in your song,” and bookends Our God, Our Help in Ages Past with parallel stanzas. And he often hides ideas in what would otherwise be straightforward praise songs—my favorite is “Let those refuse to sing/That never knew our God.” In the way that he managed to polish hymnody to a quality rarely seen before, he is both the most important hymnodist in English and a great poet.     

 After Watts was a flood of hymns throughout the eighteenth century, and on the opposite end of that era was a poet respected even higher than he: William Cowper, whose mock-epic The Task is one of the greatest 18th-Century poems. He cowrote The Olney Hymns with friend and fellow hymodist John Newton, in which are some of the most popular hymns in the English language. Unlike Watts, Cowper is personal; he hides his feelings in praise. Watts is logical, cohesive, and pragmatic; he writes for the congregation and keeps a strict meter. Both use the ABAB form, but Cowper’s is less strict, more delicate, not always adhering to a four-line stanza. Cowper is also more melodious, more memorably alliterative, especially in his first lines: “There is a fountain fill’d with blood,” “Sometimes a light surprises/The Christian while he sings.” Watts is technical, Cowper is lyrical. These two giants were not great poets who wrote great hymns, they were great hymnodists who also wrote great poetry, and are the apex of that intersection.

Secular poetry might often outrank the sacred, but sacred poetry is not therefore mediocre. Some of the greatest poets have written words that rest in every pew. It does us well to remember that, as we flip through our hymnals, they contain poetry just as important as that in anthologies.

Footnote:

   *“‘But I cannot write poetry. I have tried, and it made me laugh. It did not sound like Watts or Coleridge or Shakespeare at all.’” A Little Princess, p. 68.       

(Photo credit to Michael Maasen on Unsplash)