Martin Manser - Best Loved Hymns and Readings

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lament for fellow-poet John Keats ranks among his most celebrated poetic works. Written in 1821 in response to the news of Keats’s premature death from consumption in Rome, it is often quoted in part or in full at funerals (the extracts below comprise the more famous passages).

Many have commented upon the melancholy prescience of the final stanza in which Shelley describes how his own spirit is ‘driven far from the shore’: the following year he was himself drowned in a sudden storm while sailing in the bay of Lerici.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep;

He hath awakened from the dream of life.

‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with out spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;

Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

With sparkles ashes load an unlamented urn.

He is made one with Nature; there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird;

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never-wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He is a portion of the loveliness

Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

Sweeps through the dull, dense world, compelling there

All new successions to the forms they wear,

Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight

To its own likeness, as each mass may bear,

And bursting in its beauty and its might

From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die,

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled! Rome’s azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

Which, through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

This meditation by the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy upon the way a person might be remembered after they have died remains one of his most popular poetic works. It is sometimes recited at funerals.

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous

stay,

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say

‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

‘To him this must have been a familiar sight’.

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should

come to no harm,

But he could do little for them; and now he is gone’.

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,

‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

The words for this famous hymn were based upon lines written by St Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). Legend has it that the first four verses were inspired by the saint’s experiences after spending forty nights in a rat-infested hut at San Damiano. The fifth verse supposedly resulted from a quarrel between the church and civil authorities of Assisi, while the sixth stanza was written as the saint endured great suffering on his deathbed.

William Henry Draper, rector of a parish in Yorkshire, subsequently produced his celebrated translation of St Francis’s words for a Whitsuntide festival for school children in Leeds. The music was the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who based it upon a seventeenth-century tune from Cologne.

All creatures of our God and King,

Lift up your voice and with us sing,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Thou burning sun with golden beam,

Thou silver moon with softer gleam:

0 praise Him, 0 praise Him,Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Thou rushing wind that art so strong,

Ye clouds that sail in heaven along,

O praise Him, alleluia!

Thou rising morn, in praise rejoice;

Ye lights of evening, find a voice:

Thou flowing water, pure and clear,

Make music for thy Lord to hear,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Thou fire, so masterful and bright,

That givest us both warmth and light:

Dear mother earth, who day by day

Unfoldest blessings on our way,

O praise Him, alleluia!

The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,

Let them His glory also show:

And ye that are of tender heart,

Forgiving others, take your part,

O sing ye, alleluia!

Ye who long pain and sorrow bear,

Praise God, and on Him cast your care:

And thou, most kind and gentle death,

Waiting to hush our latest breath,

O praise Him, alleluia!

Thou leadest home the child of God,

And Christ our Lord the way has trod:

Let all things their creator bless,

And worship Him in humbleness;

O praise Him, alleluia!

Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,

And praise the Spirit, Three in One:

William Henry Draper (1855-1933)

This hymn, published in 1561, is based on Psalm 100 and has therefore come to be popularly dubbed ‘The Old Hundredth’. Its author was a Scottish-born minister in the Church of England who fled the country after the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary.