Hymns and Hymnwriting     •     Echoes of Creation

Text

My attempts at a metrical version of this psalm never coalesced into a single text. This second version¹ addressed a slightly different set of poetic and hymnic goals. The experimental closing rhymes seem a bit forced, and the grammatical structure is not as "context-free^1a" as I try to keep it, but I thought the architectonics worked:

Jesus Reigns -- Joyful universe, from the beginning

Royal command -- loyalty to the only just God

Royal command -- obedience to God's just laws.

Jesus Reigns -- Joyful humanity, to the end

The first three stanzas follow the three strophes of the psalm. The concluding stanza draws from Revelation 19:6-8 to carry the imagery into the New Testament universe. In another strike against vain materialistic language, I've retained John's explicit interpretation of the "robes" metaphor².

Use

Again, a universal song of praise is universally appropriate for worship. We have so few of these songs in our hymnal, that they are overused. Not that they say anything that could possibly be said too often: but by their frequent use, we are inured to the power of the way they say what they say. If we would expand our vocabulary of praise, I believe we would find a freshness, new delights and new revelations even in our current songs.

Music

"Meine Hoffnung" is one of several German chorale tunes in this meter. It exemplifies how a minor key can lend itself to a joyful mood -- but only an intensely joyful mood. It is, however, definitely a bit more difficult to sing than the typical Kindergarten-Sunday-School songs that make up so much of the bulk of our hymnals.

"Unser Herrscher" is a workable alternative tune; but this one seemed to me to capture the mood of the psalm better, and as usual I was trying to avoid overuse of tunes³ within the collection. But singing the text to "Unser Herrscher" would be better than not singing this psalm at all.

Notes

¹See the text and notes for Jesus reigns in power.

^1aCompare Isaac Watts's discussion of his own work. A linguistic model (borrowed by computer scientists) gives a way to measure grammatical complexity: how far do you have to dive into a sentence before you see what it's saying and how it's saying it? The simplest (and therefore clearest) structures do not require looking ahead: each word's place in the thought is obvious before you look at the next word. In the most complex structures, you cannot even begin to understand any of the sentence until you've read all of it. "Context-free" structures are almost the simplest on the scale.
In "romantic" (as opposed to "classical") poetry, thought breaks can occur at surprising points, and the word order is driven by nuances of emphasis and euphony, not simplicity of syntax. But in hymns, singers are presented with one line at a time. The line should make grammatical sense, all by itself, without looking at the next line. I'm not sure stanza four passes this test. But it was a stanza crying out to be written--the song was not complete without it. And, poetically speaking, the sentence as arranged is one of my more satisfactory final climaxes.

²This is something none of our own songs about heaven do! Why have all of our songbook editors been so dead-set and determined to expunge any hint of spirituality from the concept of heaven? (This is a sobering question!)

³Why? As Ralph Vaughan Williams pointed out (in his preface to the English Hymnal, online at CCEL) there are so many good tunes available!

This text, © Stephen Hutcheson, 2005, and offered freely for use under a Creative Commons License. These studies are created by members of the West Allen Church of Christ in Allen, Texas