Proclaimer Blog
The songword sentimentalists
There’s another curious phenomenon when it comes to the words we sing: it’s that some of us (hmm, myself too, if I’m honest) are curiously sentimental about song words when we’re often not sentimental about anything else at all. Don’t get me wrong, there’s not anything fundamentally wrong with sentiment, but I see in my own heart how often sentimental words (whatever that means for you) can sometimes trump truth. Perhaps, more common is that we end up singing things that we love but don’t necessarily resonate.
Here’s an example. Just to extend my post bag a little more you understand. I minister in the East End of London. Few of us have any kind of daily or even semi-regular experience which sounds like this:
When through the woods and forest glades I wander
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze
Then sings my soul….
This hymn is encouraging us to praise God, inspired by the nature around us. But what if that is not our nature around us? My middle class sentimentality might like this hymn but will it really serve and resonate with an urban, working class group of people. No. Of course not.
Interestingly, Stuart Hine’s translation of a translation of a translation (it was Swedish, then German, then Russian, and only then English) is pretty loose. Well. When I say, pretty loose, he ignored some verses and added new ones. Including, I understand, this one above, which Hine penned as he crossed the Carpathian mountain range. I might sing these words too if I was a mountaineer. But an earlier translation is probably better, even though it itself includes an archaism in line 2 which needs resolving (see yesterday’s post, suggestions on a postcard please):
When I behold the heavens in their vastness,
Where golden ships in azure issue forth,
Where sun and moon keep watch upon the fastness
Of changing seasons and of time on earth.
Now, living in London, that is something I can see, and therefore, I can sing… How great you are!