Today we continue our examination of hymnody as poetry, with a particular look at “the old gallery style hymn of the nonconformist Methodist churches in England.” Though they died as faithful Anglican priests, and are memorialized as saints in the Anglican liturgical calendar, no names are more inextricably linked with Methodism than those of John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788). John, of course, was the spiritual “divine,” the driving force behind the renewal movement that became, eventually, its own Christian denomination. But if John was the theological mind of Methodism, Charles was its poetic voice. 

In fact, with Isaac Watts and a handful of  others, we may think of Charles Wesley as not merely the poetic voice of Methodism, but a central voice in the entire tradition of sacred hymnody in English. Such hymns as “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” appear in nearly every traditional English-language hymnal across the Christian spectrum. Wesley’s “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” (originally “Hark! How All the Welkin Rings,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so readily) is, like Watts’s “Joy to the World,” a Christmas standard. Curiously, the original tune for this familiar carol was “Salisbury,” with which we’re most familiar as the setting for Wesley’s Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Less universally sung, but equally beautiful and characteristic in its balance of heartfelt piety with poetic constraint, Wesley’s “Christ Whose Glory Fills the Skies” deserves wider inclusion in the hymnals of every Christian tradition.

Today’s Poem of the Day, perhaps Wesley’s best-known general hymn, exemplifies that same delicate balance of piety with restraint which was so much a feature of the Methodist character. First published in 1747, in a collection called “Hymns for those that Seek, and those that have redemption,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” purportedly responds to a song in an opera, “King Arthur,” by the seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell (d. 1695), with a libretto by John Dryden (1631–1700). In Act V of that opera, Venus sings a paean to England:

Fairest Isle, all Isles excelling,
Seat of pleasures and of loves;
Venus here will chuse her Dwelling,
And forsake her Cyprian groves.

Wesley clearly borrowed both Dryden’s stately tetrameter, as well as Dryden’s exact a-rhyme end-words for his own opening stanza. His version, however, is not a parody so much as an entire reformation of the operatic song. “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” celebrates not a place that is, but a person who will be, as the work of conversion is completed in him. “If any man be in Christ,” writes St. Paul in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, “he is a new creation: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” In Wesley’s hands, that verse extends itself both as a personal prayer, expressing the writer’s own hope for human perfectibility in Christ, and as a poem composed of octets in ababcdcd rhyme. 

Today we’re most likely to sing this hymn to another Welsh tune, “Hyfrydol,” though in many American hymnals it’s set to the 1870 composition “Beecher.” But in a nod to the hymn’s origins as a response to Purcell, the great Maddy Prior performs it in a pleasingly stripped-down arrangement of that elegant Baroque melody. 

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
by Charles Wesley

Love divine, all loves excelling,
joy of heav’n to earth come down,
fix in us Thy humble dwelling;
all Thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus, Thou art all compassion,
pure, unbounded love Thou art;
visit us with Thy salvation;
enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit
into every troubled breast!
Let us all in Thee inherit,
let us find the promised rest.
Take away our love of sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
end of faith, as its beginning,
set our hearts at liberty.

Come, Almighty to deliver;
let us all Thy life receive;
suddenly return and never,
nevermore Thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
serve Thee as Thy hosts above;
pray, and praise Thee without ceasing,
glory in Thy perfect love.

Finish then, Thy new creation;
pure and spotless let us be;
let us see Thy great salvation
perfectly restored in Thee.
Changed from glory into glory,
till in heav’n we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before Thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise.

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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.