Strange ups and downs of a Coronation hymn
Ihad forgotten that at the Queen’s Coronation the choir sang the Veni, Creator Spiritus, “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire”. It was an hour into the three-hour service in Westminster Abbey.
A striking thing is that the tune they used was certainly more than 1,000 years old. It is found, in the notation called neums, on a manuscript from 1065, a year before the Norman Conquest, kept at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Very likely this was the tune to which the hymn was first sung after its composition by that astonishing figure Hrabanus Maurus, born about 780 and dying in 856.
Anyway, it is timely this week, which began, on the day of the Jubilee pageant, with Pentecost, Whit Sunday, celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit. Hrabanus wrote the hymn for use on this day: six stanzas each of four short lines. It is reckoned to have had more impact on the Church than any such hymn, except, one scholar judges, the Te Deum.
The translation sung at the Coronation came down by a curious route, for it is the work of John Cosin, Bishop of Durham, who had a hard time of it before and during the Civil Wars, being impeached in 1641, bailed on a surety of £10,000 and escaping into exile disguised as a miller.
At the Restoration he contributed amendments to the Book of Common Prayer of 1662. Among them was his version of Veni, Creator Spiritus for use at the ordination of priests as an alternative to Thomas Cranmer’s version, part of the Prayer Book since 1552.
Cranmer’s prose everyone loves. His verse for Veni, Creator Spiritus is rougher. It is written in fourteeners, long lines of 14 syllables, each line like two lines of a ballad such as The Ancient Mariner. It’s the same metre as the Psalm version used for the setting by Thomas Tallis on which Vaughan Williams founded his Fantasia. (The Psalm 2 that Tallis set begins: “Why fum’th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout?” )
Cranmer’s version of Hrabanus’ hymn runs to 32 of these long lines. There’s a homely Tudor air to it: “Of strife and of dissensión dissolve, O Lord, the bands, / And knit the knots of peace and love throughout all Christian lands.”
He translates Hrabanus’ lines Tu septiformis munere,/ dextrae Dei tu digitus as: “Thou in thy gyftes arte manifolde, whereby Christes Churche doeth stande: / In faythfull heartes wrytinge thy lawe, the fynger of Goddes hande.”
In 1840, this couplet was translated by Edward Caswall as: “Thou in thy sevenfold gifts art known; / Thee Finger of God’s hand we own.” Caswall was a curate at St Lawrence, Stratford-sub-castle, between Old Sarum and the Avon. In 1847 he was received into the Catholic Church and became a member of John Henry Newman’s Oratory at Birmingham. In 1928 the American Episcopal Prayer Book replaced Cranmer wth Caswall’s version, which had been included in Hymns Ancinet and Modern in 1874.
John Dryden too had published a translation in 1693, by when he was a Catholic, and the energetic John Wesley adapted it to be easily singable. Dryden made one couplet, “O, Source of uncreated Light, / The Father’s promised Paraclite.” Wesley changed it to “O Source of uncreated Heat / The father’s promised Paraclete.” The English Hymnal resolved the uneasiness by making it light and Paraclete, though they don’t rhyme. The amalgam can be sung lustily to John Bacchus Dykes’ tune “Melita”, familiar from For those in peril on the sea.
I very much hope that at the next Coronation they sing Veni, Creator Spiritus.
We are in as much need of inspiration as ever.