Poem of the Day: ‘Light Shining Out of Darkness’

“This morning, as she went about humming God moves in a mysterious way, Belinda wondered what to do first,” the English novelist Barbara Pym writes of a character. Her 1950 novel, “Some Tame Gazelle,” is a almost a book of quotations, set in a village steeped in the words of “Our Greater English Poets.” From the archdeacon, whose sermons consist entirely of strung-together passages from such notable works as Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” to the Tacitus-quoting Italian Count Ricardo Bianco, to the humble spinster Belinda Bede, warming herself with fragments of Keats, the novel points to a culture and a language rooted in its literature. Everyday life is given shape by the vocabulary of English poets and hymn-writers. And in the course of the novel’s action, the first lines of Barbara Pym’s own favorite hymn — God moves in a mysterious way, / His wonders to perform — recur in Belinda’s mind as the ironic commentary of a chorus, to mark the ridiculous and mystifying adventures of the human heart.Although today’s poem, “Light Shining Out of Darkness,” by the often-troubled eighteenth-century poet William Cowper (1731–1800), departs from our usual Wednesday course of light verse, it has acquired this twentieth-century comic connection. Yet that comic connection flowers from a culture in whose deep language these words, sung as a hymn, have been planted. Written in 1773, “Light Shining in Darkness” appeared in the 1779 “Olney Hymns,” whose other contributor was the Evangelical curate and former slave-ship captain John Newton (1725–1807). Of the nearly three hundred-fifty hymns in the original hymnal, roughly six survive in regular church use today, including Newton’s “Amazing Grace” and “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” (which will appear as tomorrow’s Poem of the Day). These famous hymns persist — however faintly in the cacophony of contemporary life — as part of a Christian vernacular, a still-living subset of the English language.American readers may be less familiar with Cowper’s hymn than with any of the others featured here this week. In England it has been sung to a seventeenth-century tune, “New London,” or alternately to “Dundee,” from the 1615 Scottish Psalter. In American hymnals it has also appeared in various settings. Among them are the 1843 “Manoah,” Charles Wesley’s 1749 “Irish,” and William Croft’s “St. Anne,” the 1708 tune better known as the setting for “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” The beauty of a simple common-meter stanza, with its alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, is that you can sing it to a wide range of melodies, translating it into nearly any musical vernacular from the Baroque to the Sacred Harp. The poem itself was drafted on the brink of one of Cowper’s descents into depression, which culminated in an attempt at suicide by drowning. (See his “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” which appeared as the Sun’s Poems of the Day this past summer.) The abab quatrains read like the stanzas of a psalm, in which God appears successively as a miraculous water-walker, a delver in precious metals, a storm of mercy, a season ripening toward the harvest, and, most poignantly, the mysterious Word which interprets itself. Though it’s the first line that Belinda Bede recites to herself repeatedly, that last line highlights the potency of a good hymn as it works its way into our own everyday language, bringing its light to the mystery of our lives. Light Shining Out of Darknessby William CowperGod moves in a mysterious way,His wonders to perform;He plants his footsteps in the sea,And rides upon the storm.Deep in unfathomable minesOf never-failing skill,He treasures up his bright designs,And works his sov’reign will.Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,The clouds ye so much dreadAre big with mercy, and shall breakIn blessings on your head.Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,But trust him for his grace;Behind a frowning providenceHe hides a smiling face.His purposes will ripen fast,Unfolding ev’ry hour;The bud may have a bitter taste,But sweet will be the flow’r.Blind unbelief is sure to err,And scan his work in vain;God is his own interpreter,And he will make it plain.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Light Shining Out of Darkness’

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