by Rowan Williams
My thoughts about the content of this lecture began (unsurprisingly) with George Herbert – usually a good place to start, and indeed finish; because Herbert is the only unquestionably major English poet to have made a significant contribution to the repertoire of English hymns. Four of Herbert’s poems appear regularly in hymn lists – ‘Antiphon’ (‘Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing’), ‘The Elixir’ (‘Teach me, my God and King’), ‘Praise II’ (‘King of Glorie, King of Peace’) and the psalm paraphrase ‘The God of love my shepherd is.’ There are of course some other English poets whose work appears in hymnals. Robert Bridges is well represented in the English Hymnal as a translator and adapter; but few would argue that he is a poet of the first rank. The translations are workmanlike, sometimes better than workmanlike, and have lasted pretty well, but the only completely original piece contributed to the English Hymnal (‘Rejoice, O land, in God thy might’) is a rather unexciting composition. Spenser’s sonnet, ‘Most glorious Lord of Life’ appeared in the English Hymnal. A poem of William Blake’s (‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love’) is included in the same hymnal and its more modern versions, though it has never quite won the hearts of congregations and needs some political correcting for the twenty-first century (references to ‘heathen, Turk, or Jew’ are not well-received these days). The same author’s ‘Jerusalem’ is now also a regular in hymn collections, despite (or because of?) its triumphantly eccentric mythology and metaphor. And then there is Tennyson. ‘Strong Son of God, Immortal Love’ is in fact a section of In Memoriam, and its wording, carefully read, reflects the poet’s troubled and tentative speculation rather than any clear doctrinal content (‘Thou seemest human and divine’); it is not too surprising that it is rarely sung these days (was it ever?).
In short, hymnody in English has not often been written by serious poets; and the same seems to be true of other European languages, though I am open to correction on this. This is not to deny for a moment that individual hymn writers may produce work of striking poetic quality, metrically tight and metaphorically adventurous. The Vexilla regis manages to handle a very complex bundle of interlocking images to do with the cross – not only the cross as the legionary standard for the divine emperor’s armies, but the scales or balance on which the weight of payment for sin is calculated, and the maternal breast on which a child might lie; and it does so in verses of exceptional control and economy. Nun ruhen alle Waelder manages rather more than just a conventional use of the imagery of evening-as-mortality (and Bridges’s translation for the Yattendon Hymnal, reproduced in the English Hymnal, has some fine passages, though they have travelled a very long way from the German original). Wesley’s ‘Come, O thou Traveller unknown’ is generally acknowledged as a powerful poem in its own right, as is Anne Griffiths’s extraordinary ‘Wele’n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd’. And examples could be multiplied down to more recent times (Hilary Greenwood’s ‘Walking in a garden’ has, I think, a good claim to be taken seriously in this connection). But overall we are rightly cautious about expecting a good poem to make a good hymn, even if a good hymn may sometimes be a good poem. The case of Herbert is instructive. Three of the four familiar Herbert texts have an obvious liturgical flavor (the title ‘Antiphon’ is not accidental, the psalm paraphrase is what it says it is, and ‘Praise II’ again announces in the title its ritual flavor). ‘The Elixir’ is an interesting and rare example of a poem with some highly distinctive imagery establishing itself as a congregational favorite; but it is worth noting that it took some time for it to find its place, undoubtedly helped by the selection for the English Hymnal of the delightful carol melody ‘Sandys’ (arranged by Vaughan Williams) as its tune. Other Herbert lyrics have been set to music over the centuries (he himself, of course, is said to have done this in his lifetime) and one (‘The Call’ – ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life’) has occasionally in recent years appeared in hymn collections, but there has generally been a recognition that a devotional lyric is not necessarily a hymn, and that there are problems with mixing these genres too freely.
But where do the boundaries lie exactly? There are no watertight answers to this question, but here are a few thoughts on the distinction. To begin with, what do we mean by calling a poem ‘lyrical’? A lyric in ordinary usage is a poem presenting a moment of insight into or response to specific perceptions, images or emotions, and it exists in its own poetic time-frame: it does what it does in the course of its own performance. So whether we are thinking about a mediaeval lyric like ‘I sing of a maiden’ or about the poetry of St John of the Cross or indeed about something like the lyric that forms the fourth section of Eliot’s Little Gidding, lyrical writing demands a certain self-containment, in religious as much as in secular contexts. A lyric may be adopted into a wider context, as part of a drama or a sequence of emotional explorations linked together; but it remains in itself a specific process, a journey undertaken in or with these words and pictures here and now. Historically, lyric would have been associated with music, and one way of understanding any lyrical composition is as a potential or actual song – a piece of limited length and specific focus, neither epic nor ballad (though these too would have been sung). ‘I sing of a maiden’ certainly has a song-like quality, and each stanza presents a single beautifully distilled simile (‘He cam also stille/Ther his moder was/ as dew in Aprille/ That falleth on the grass’); it needs no context, and it does what it has to do, which is simply to offer a brief sequence of metaphorical ‘lights’ falling on a plain surface. Even divorced from actual musical setting, it does not need a rationale beyond its own defined movement.
The hymn has its origins in a rather different context. If we take I Corinthians 13 or Philippians 2.6-11 or the various songs of praise cited in Revelation as the beginnings of Christian hymnody, it is clear that they – like some of the Hebrew psalms or such classical texts as the Homeric hymns or the ‘Hymn to Zeus’ of Cleanthes – are not meant to crystallize a specific insight or moment of perception or single cluster of imagery. They set out a context; it could be said that they help establish a grammar for religious understanding. This is the world of reference inhabited by the believer or devotee. Cleanthes’s hymn tells us what it is to speak to and about the supreme God; Philippians 2 tells us what it is to speak about the divine initiative in the life and death of Jesus. Early extra-biblical texts like the phos hilaron (‘Hail, gladdening light’) locate themselves at a particular time in the liturgical day; others, rather later, provide doctrinal summaries (like the possibly sixth century Monogenes huios still used in the Byzantine liturgy). The fragmentary Oxyrhynchus hymn of the third century is hard to pin down to particular seasons or times of day, but seems to be a straightforward invocation of the Trinity as exceeding all created words or sounds that might be used for praise. The poetry of Ephrem the Syrian in the fourth century is a more elaborate and extended corpus than anything we possess in Greek from this period, but is essentially extended metrical meditation on doctrinal themes, developed with enormous metaphorical creativity; it foreshadows the idiom of Byzantine liturgical poetry as contained in the seasonal troparia and kontakia. But what all these early texts and styles have in common is precisely the evocation of a world of reference, more or less closely tied to doctrinal formulation; both ascription and description, address to God relating what God has done or what God is, and thus also a map of images and concepts appropriate for the shared public work, leitourgia, of the community at prayer. And this is why the frontier between liturgical hymnody and credal formulation is so fluid in the early period – not only in Christian Scripture but in the fourth century, when there is a clear crossover between formulae used in liturgy and the texts of various creeds.
In other words, what most distinctively characterizes hymns as opposed to lyrical religious poetry is that they work – we could say – from the outside inwards. They establish what the framework is within which the life of faith is lived and so invite the worshipper to ‘settle’ afresh within that world and appropriate it for herself or himself. The lyric, in contrast, works from the inside outwards: it identifies a view from a particular perspective of feeling or imagining, and moves to relate it to a received framework. And of course this also means that a lyric may challenge such a framework in certain ways, unsettling rather than settling the believer’s position, even if it finally draws back towards the terms of the shared world: Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ is a dramatic example, but you could also turn to Donne’s religious lyrics, including the Holy Sonnets, for examples of deliberate pushing of the framework. It would not be easy to imagine a congregation singing a setting of ‘The Collar’ let alone ‘Batter my Heart, three-person’d God’. To be invited to appropriate a very specific point of view as a community is peculiar; even to appropriate a very distinctive or original set of images is a strain on corporate activity.
This is not quite the same as saying that the lyric is more ‘emotional’ than the hymn. Hymnody may be intensely emotional, but it will deal in the emotions that are recognised as common in the world the hymn evokes. Many if not most of the hymns we find in the ‘General’ section of hymnbooks will be likely to aim at some sort of emotional response – a sense of yearning, an overflow of gratitude, a recognition of failure or need. But the point is precisely that these are the emotions we acknowledge instantly as regularly occurring in this kind of world, as part of a shared language of devotion that has been stimulated by the broad lines of shared doctrine. Even with these, however, a hymn that moves too dramatically in the direction of highly individualized feeling poses problems: when is it appropriate to use? How far am I being invited to take as my own the feelings of a specific other rather than the emotional vocabulary of a whole tradition? Newman’s great ‘Lead, kindly Light’ is an example of a composition that sits on an uncomfortable edge in this respect, leaning a long way towards plain autobiographical reference; a bit nearer to Donne’s ‘Batter my heart’ than to ‘Hail, gladdening Light’. Lyric has no need for embarrassment about intensity and irregularity of feeling, and indeed draws its strength from the unexpected emotional turn it may evoke or enact. Hymnody may reasonably feel such embarrassment.
Another way of putting this is to cast it in terms of narrative. A lyric grows from the narrative of a particular human sensibility, but as a lyric it does not have to ‘narrate’ anything but what it contains. Knowing the biographical background may or may not help with grasping that internal movement; indeed, the more we need to know of this, the less successful the lyric is. A religious lyric leads the reader through a sequence of verbal developments and invites or challenges the reader to make the connection with the wider world of religious discourse. In that connection, it invites the reader to reflect on whether this specific movement of thought or feeling is possible, accessible, imaginable for another believer or indeed a non-believer; it is intriguing that some religious lyrics – Herbert’s ‘Love III’ is the most obvious example – manage to persuade a good many non-religious readers of their emotional integrity and credibility. The way we read lyrics is a little like what we bring to reading novels: we consciously invite into our own field of experience another’s field of experience and perception, following the pace and direction of wherever this takes us. The work we read needs to have enough energy and integrity to keep us moving in step; this may not be my experience but it’s an experience I can imagine living through and can, while I’m reading, make my own. This is why poetry with a strong religious content can, if it is good enough as poetry, hold the attention of the unbelieving reader; why Herbert or John of the Cross or Eliot or R.S. Thomas can command the respect of a secular critic. What matters is the force of the narrative that this particular poem sets out. A poem like Herbert’s ‘Love III’ begins by abruptly inviting the reader to accept a supposition – infinite love’s reality and agency presented unequivocally to the human subject; given this starting point, what would be a credible emotional and imaginative process unfolding from such a supposition? The poem ‘works’ because its answer to that question has a logic that is pursued with appropriately exact and demanding dramatic credibility.
But this is clearly different from what happens in the reading and performance of a hymn. The hymn narrates not what the poet knows/senses in this specific moment but what is shared and exchanged in the language of the community. This is the story that explains ‘us’; why we are together as a human collectivity. Words that are said or sung liturgically are primarily directed not to building a bridge between one human sensibility and another, inviting a potentially risky entry into another individual’s world of reference, but to locating the person speaking, singing, reading or hearing within a world that does not belong to one person or another but is presented as a common frame, a world that is more than individual; one that does not depend on a single specific moment or point of view. My use of the words of the hymn (or any other liturgical text, for that matter) is one of the ways in which I open up my experience, not to another person’s narrative, but to what is claimed to be the story of the universe I share with others, as Christian believers tell that story. Thus the criteria for a good hymn are not going to be those of the lyric. It does not have to ‘work’ in terms of what it can achieve in the brief space of the words, presenting a credible movement of feeling and thought within these quite narrow boundaries. The invitation is for me to re-tell my own story in the context of the larger story laid out in the liturgical text. My participation is a matter of allowing myself to be included in this larger story, reading my experience afresh in its light, reappropriating the major images and categories of that story to deepen and extend my awareness of who I and my neighbors are.
Hymns are thus most obviously themselves when they occur at specific points in the liturgical action or in the liturgical year – or, with the traditional office hymns, within the liturgical day or week. They serve the exposition and acting-out of the large story, whether of a single liturgical performance or of the progression of the Christian year. ‘On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry’ or Wachet auf! will make sense primarily as proposals for reconnecting the singer/hearer with the specific moment in the Christian year when we are encouraged to put ourselves in the attitude of expectation. A toi la gloire or ‘Love’s redeeming work’ will likewise make sense as the culmination of a developed narrative of the ministry, passion and death of Jesus. Such compositions assume that the story extends, backwards and forwards, beyond their own narrative limits; their meaning is also bound up with other elements in the narrative than the ones they explicitly deal with. To make the point once again, they do not have to ‘achieve’ what they do simply within the frame of their own wording; they do not have to establish their moral and imaginative seriousness by the concentrated interweaving of their own internal structure. Their credibility is not that of a new perspective shaped by another specific place in the world. It rests on the overall authority of the world it celebrates. Something of the same applies with hymns within a single liturgical action. In addition to whatever they may say about the liturgical calendar, they have, conventionally, a relation to the movement of the liturgical process, especially at the Eucharist: what is appropriate as an introit will be different from what might do as an offertory. The effective meaning of an individual hymn will depend on more than its own content.
So it should not be surprising if – in contrast to the lyric – the hymn seldom attracts sympathetic attention from the non-believer. Taken in isolation, it will always be less than a satisfying poetic unit, whatever its poetic excellence of expression. And its point will be to connect us with a rhythm and content that is understood as a ‘given’, a common ground for the worshipping body. In this sense, hymnody is ‘conservative’, unlikely to be marked by the poetic pressures that may make a lyric challenging or troubling. A text that had the plain intensity of ‘Batter my heart’ or the emotional strain of ‘The Collar’ or the exceptional contemplative depth of John of the Cross’s ‘Spiritual Canticle’ would go well beyond what is practical and appropriate for a hymn – because the particular, self-contained rhythms of these poems of struggle and surrender could not, without a measure of emotional sleight of hand or even dishonesty, be made into a corporate celebration of what is given. A hymn may of course be troubling in other ways – because of inept language that is theologically or psychologically ill-conceived, for example; and its troubling character would be a reason for looking again at its wording. One of the areas of tension that is most evident here – and I don’t intend to offer any solutions, even if I knew what they might be – is the increasing sensitivity to exclusively masculine language in many traditional English hymns: editors have had to balance the inescapably conservative role of the hymn (it should not simply be reflecting current anxieties) against the fact that language really does change (think of the shift in the meaning of the English word ‘awful’ in recent centuries: ‘Jehovah’s awful throne’ made sense in the eighteenth century but sounds absurd in the twenty first, when the word has entirely negative associations) – and also that once a question has been raised about the possibly disturbing effect of some sorts of language it can’t be put back in the box. But that is a very particular kind of problem, and I want to concentrate here on more general issues. What I am trying to argue is that a hymn should not be pushing the frontiers; its challenge is connected with the challenge of an entire world of reference. It is not that I am being invited to wrestle with the unusual spiritual explorations of a great and complex spirit expressed in a profound religious lyric. In the hymn, I am being invited to wrestle with the difficulty and strangeness of the cross of Christ, the mysteriousness of God the creator, the unexpectedness of divine forgiveness, the outpouring of the Spirit in the community. I am being reminded again of the newness of the world opened up by revelation. Paradoxically, what I have been calling the conservatism of the hymn is what continues to bring me as singer or hearer into the new world revealed, because it holds my attention on what is distinctive about Christian belief.
All this is a labored introduction to the main theme of this conference, but I hope in what is left of this lecture to spell out a bit why such an introduction might be helpful. In what I have said so far, I have had no intention of suggesting that either the hymn or the lyric is superior or more important; only of trying to define the difference. Does it matter that much to be clear about the difference? I think the answer is yes, for two reasons. The first is to do with the nature of liturgy itself. Quite a lot of Christians, Catholic as much as Protestant, are growing up and being formed in a climate in which liturgy is poorly understood, where it is thought of as more or less identical with ritual and so as associated with what is public and formal rather than personal. The temptation is to look for ways of making liturgy ‘personal’; and one such may well be to introduce more material that appears to be about direct emotional response to the gift of God. The music of the liturgy is an obvious place to do this, and it is very tempting to reconstruct the liturgical action as a series of awkward ritual episodes punctuated by devotional songs. Simple devotional songs are not often very like the sophisticated religious lyrics I have been discussing, but they have the same characteristic of bringing exceptional emotion into the foreground or the spotlight. But this carries problems with it. It suggests a lack of confidence in liturgy as such and it removes a major opportunity for enhancing and extending the understanding of how the liturgy works, how it moves on its path (within the liturgical event and within the liturgical calendar). If liturgy is an action in which the believer is introduced into a larger world, into an environment where one can begin to see what is meant by speaking of a ‘new creation’, its elements should be consistently working towards this deeper and more extended sense of a universe of image and story and doctrine, rather than returning constantly to an examination of individual responses. Hymnody enriches and reinforces, so I have argued, the newness of the new world and so the bonds I have with the neighbor: I know as I perform the liturgy and its celebratory words and music that I genuinely share a world, and that it is a world into which I and my neighbor are constantly growing rather than one that I have to reconstruct for myself out of my interior perception, or one that I can master and internalize for my own use. Good liturgy deepens my solidarity with others – with Christians, obviously, by affirming the world of reference that is shared; but also, I suggest, with the human world more generally. I am drawn out of isolation and reminded that there is a context for all my actions and thoughts that is more than my individual imagination can generate; and so I am able to see all human relations as included in the scope of what the new world of the liturgy celebrates and thus to understand new possibilities in any and every relation I am involved in. A weakening or impoverishing of the scope of the new world leaves me with less resource to engage with the whole of the human environment.
This may seem a long way from a decision as to what to sing on Sunday; but the distance is not that great. If what liturgy speaks of and acts out is a true representation of the reality it directs us to, if liturgy is serious, it needs to break through habits of mind that constantly lead us back to a merely individual narrative and an introspective agenda. What we sing will tell us whether or not we think liturgy is truly about an alternative reality – the world restored in the Paschal Mystery. And this leads to the second reason for being concerned to get straight the distinction between hymn and lyric and so between hymn and devotional song. The hymn as I have suggested we understand it puts my own imagination and sensibility under scrutiny, even under judgement. There are ‘canonical’ ways of appropriating, sensing and responding to the new world, and my participation in liturgy is part of my own process of appropriating these ways of receiving what is put before me. Even if I don’t and can’t simply reproduce such canonical responses, if I feel distanced or alienated or uncomprehending, the words of liturgical action feed in to my sense of who I am or might become; I am left in a different place, which may or may not be a more compliant or reconciled one but is at least larger than the place defined by my feelings alone. We have already thought about why the liturgical use of a devotional lyric would be strange or problematic: it would engage me with a human other working to make sense of the language of faith – a serious and significant element in any story of Christian growth, but not the proper focus of liturgy itself. So, when liturgy is dominated by what we could call a ‘lyric’ sensibility, the risk is of a confusing emotional tangle. A highly personal, ‘lyrical’ statement in song, presented in the context of shared worship, doesn’t only invite me to reflect on the struggle and tension of another particular believer; used as a shared language it suggests that this personal voice is the canonical response to the events and realities that create faith. And this can lead, as we noted earlier, to a kind of emotional dishonesty, an appropriation of very particularized emotion as if my feelings ought to be those of another specific individual, the individual whose voice I hear in the song.
As will be very clear, the boundaries are not straightforward here. A hymn may combine strong doctrinal content with marked, even extravagant lyrical elements – ‘And can it be?’ or ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. It can thus be very ‘directive’ about appropriate emotional response to the content in a way that goes a bit beyond simply evoking the agreed and expected responses that convention defines. And a lyric may embody doctrinal statement (as in the first and last stanzas of ‘I sing of a maiden’). But if there is no exact science about the boundaries, there are some rules of thumb – not unrelated to St Teresa of Avila’s remark about the difference between experiences that start in us and end in God and those that start with God and end in us. Feeling may be evoked by the images and words of faith in a way that inexorably leads us away from ourselves; the magnitude of the object takes over from the intensity of what we feel. And there are feelings that are evoked by meditation on the great themes of the faith that produce a fascination with what is going on in me. It seems safe to start from the assumption that the hymn, even when it deliberately works towards a felt response of some personal intensity (as in ‘When I survey’ or Herzliebster Jesu), needs to highlight the object of that response rather than the strength of feeling – to use the strength of feeling in order to enhance the vision of the object rather than the other way around. Whatever role the lyrical sensibility plays in hymnody, it needs not to obscure the fundamental direction of liturgy towards the process by which we are ‘acclimatised’ to a new reality.
Lyrical or devotional material, said or sung, still has a place, of course, in Christian usage. Serious and challenging lyrics provide a proper and indeed essential test for the Christian imagination as it matures: there are passive and deadening ways for receiving what the liturgy gives, and for images to be kept alive they need to be stretched and renewed, and sometimes set at a distance. They need to be put alongside the complexities of human emotion and particular histories so that we can assess their truthfulness and effectiveness under pressure. What the good lyric does for us – from ‘Love III’ to Eliot, Geoffrey Hill or Christian Wiman – is to make the shared world of religious language strange to us again by seeing it through the prism of a single and perhaps troubled human consciousness. For that to be a regular part of Christian practice is as essential as any other way of extending and enlivening Christian imagination. Its context, though, is not primarily liturgical. A liturgical event may sometimes be enriched by the inclusion of a poetic reflection, but it is bound to introduce an element that will need careful work to be integrated into the action of the liturgy. Without such care it can become either a mere illustration for the action (losing its integrity in the process) or an interruption. One of the most interesting challenges to our Christian practice, I suspect, is that of finding contexts in which the challengingly poetic can be experienced and absorbed with others, but not in a liturgical setting. It is worth remembering that a good many hymns of more lyrical character were originally designed for meetings other than Sunday worship – as part of devotions to be carried on in cells, Methodist classes and the like. Similarly – though this has sometimes caused understandable amusement – the hymns designated in traditional hymn books as ‘For Missions Only’ were implicitly recognized as appropriate for occasions of challenge and emotional intensity rather than for the ordinary diet of a congregation.
I suppose that what I am arguing is that the hymn and the lyric both need to know where they belong; that they are both essential aspects of Christian formation, but that they can be damaging and restrictive when they travel too freely into each other’s territory. A lyrical invasion of the liturgy produces a blurring of the narrative integrity of liturgy – the shape of the sacramental action or the liturgical calendar – pulling the shared language of the event towards a consideration simply of what it feels like. But a hymnodic invasion of the more personal or small-scale sphere is equally problematic: it can mean that public formulations are allowed to obscure the real difficulties of relating classical doctrine and metaphor to particular lives; it can rob us of the startling insight that a distinctive, even eccentric, poetic perception can offer. This is a hard message to sell when there is a prevailing loss of nerve about liturgy and a prevailing temptation to allow the lyrical sensibility to solve the problems of indifference to or alienation from or misunderstanding of liturgy. But I believe it is a message that has to be clarified if we are to avoid losing what matters most in hymn and lyric alike – which is the freedom to be taken outside our imaginative comfort zones, whether by the challenge to inhabit more deeply the vocabulary of a tradition shaped by convictions about the comprehensive nature of the change that Jesus brings about, or by the challenge of extreme or unusual emotional and imaginative response to the tradition, embodied in unexpected or intense patterns of words. In plainer language: we don’t rescue public worship by turning up the emotional temperature or by exaggerating the imaginative originality of the words said or sung. That is not a prescription for dull orthodoxy and no more in our hymns; far from it. Hymns need energy, metaphorical invention and vigor of diction. But they are there to serve a dramatic action which gives them their rationale, as much as any Sophoclean chorus.
I did say that Herbert was a good place to start and stop, so to Herbert I go for a final thought. In ‘Prayer I’, he imagines prayer a ‘A kinde of tune which all things heare and fear’. Hymnody is part of the believer’s and the community’s struggle to make that tune audible, the melody which is the great narrative of creation and salvation, the timeless decree of the eternal Trinity acted out in history. Lyric too seeks to be attuned to this; but it does so by examining the actual experience of hearing and fearing in specific moments and specific lives. And it seems that it is only as both work together that we end, like Herbert, with ‘something understood.’
© Rowan Williams
The author is the former Archbishop of Canterbury. This address was given on July 27, 2015 in Cambridge, England at the joint conference of the Hymn Society in Great Britain and Ireland, the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada, and the Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Hymnologie. Reprinted with the author’s permission.
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