by Timothy Dusenbury
Why do new hymn texts disappoint me? Itโs not blind conservatism. I love Fred Pratt Green, Anne LeCroy, and others.
So why do I grow suspicious and wait for disappointment when I see recent dates on the lower left? Because more often than not, I am asked to sing something like โour planet reawakensโ or to refer to God as the โtwirler of the stardustโ.
And what is so problematic about these lines? Nouns, I think. The nouns are the problem.
What about the nouns? Initially I thought it was that they smacked of a post-Enlightenment worldview. Then I came across โYou stem the drudgery of timeโ.
I challenge you to hymn the word โdrudgeryโ without the hint of a smirk.
But โdrudgeryโ is a fine English word of late medieval coinage. So much for the post-Enlightenment idea.
I think I came across an answer in a poem by Dan Gerber, one of the finer living American poets. Like all good poems, this is worth reading aloud or at least slowly.
The Bear on Main Street
What made the man kill this bear?
His truck, across which the bear’s body lies,
tells me it wasn’t to feed his family
or because his children were cold.The bear has beautiful black feet,
delicateโจ almost, like the soles of patent leather slippers,
and the wind riffles the surface of its fur
with the sheen of water in the autumn sun.The bear looks as if it might only be sleeping,
but its tongue lags from its mouth, and the man
has wrapped it with stout twine and bound it
to the bed of his truck
as if he were afraid it might speak.Three teenage boys pull their pickup to the curb.
One of the boys guesses what the bear must weigh.
Another wants to know how many shots it took,
and the third boy climbs down. He strokes its nose and forehead.He traces the bear’s no longer living skull
with the living bones of his fingers
and wonders by what impossible road
he will come to his father’s country.
The poem is set in contemporary, rural America. The nouns of the first four stanzas reinforce that fact: truck, slippers, twine, pickup, shots. He is writing from Main Street.
The early stanzas paint a fine scene, but it is the final stanza that makes the poem.
He traces the bear’s no longer living skull
with the living bones of his fingers
and wonders by what impossible road
he will come to his father’s country.
Consider the nouns: bear, skull, bones, fingers, road, father, country.
None of these words are antiquated. They are all part of our everyday syntax.
Then why is this stanza different? Because these nouns are shared. They are words common to both to the syntax of everyday and the syntax of myth.
Here is a crude experiment as proof: โand wonders by what impossible streetโ
Street is strictly our word.
Road is ours, but also belongs to the world of Beowulf, Odysseus, Jesus, and the Buddha.
This is not the key to writing great hymn texts, but if new texts are to survive, they need to play their part in convincing us that the streets of our life comprise a way, and share a road.
Timothy Dusenbury is a composer, teacher, and church musician near Washington, D.C. He recently completed his MA in Liturgical Music at St. John’s School of Theology-Seminary.
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