Save That Thou Art

There are several hymns sung to the tune of the “Irish folk melody” Slane. It’s a storied tune, supposedly named after the Irish Hill of Slane were St. Patrick “lit an Easter fire in defiance of the pagan king Lóegaire”. It’s also very evocative. I first heard the tune in Lord of All Hopefulness, which ends each line with a countdown of the passing day: the break of the day, the noon of the day, the eve of the day, and the end of the day.

But my favorite is Be Thou My Vision, using words translated from a much earlier Irish poem. The original is, by tradition, attributed to the Irish poet and saint Dallán Forgaill. According to online sources, Mary Elizabeth Byrne translated “Rop Tú Mo Baile” from a Middle Gaelic poem to an English-language poem, and published it in 1905. Eleanor Hull “versified” the poem in 1912, though I can’t see whether she was versifying Byrne’s translations or going back to the original Gaelic.¹

It’s not just that this earlier date puts it into the public domain that makes it my favorite—although that helps! As much as I enjoy Lord of All Hopefulness, there’s something contrived about its lyrics. In contrast, Be Thou My Vision is heartfelt and simple.

Looking at the various versions, the conversion from poem to hymn is an interesting class in how to translate a very personal prayer into a hymn to be sung during Catholic Mass.

Compare them closely and you’ll see a degenderization in the St. Michael Hymnal version’s third verse, compared to the 1919 Church Hymnal version of Byrne’s translation. The third line of the second verse reads, in the original:

• Thou my great Father, and I Thy dear son,
• Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Whereas in the St. Michael version, you can see it as:

• Thou my great Father, thine own may I be:
• Thou in me dwelling, and I one with thee.

Note to the bowdlerizers of great hymns: it is possible to change lyrics to actually be more universal, instead of changing them to bowdlerize God the Father and segregate humanity. The original was a personal prayer, written by an individual who, presumably—while the Irish authorship is generally attributed to Dallán Forgaill, it is by no means certain—was male. But a hymn is not normally sung by an individual, it is sung by a congregation. Mary Byrne’s original translation appears to be a translation of Forgaill’s prayer, not a conversion of the prayer into a hymn. That’s almost certainly why it was modified further to make it a Catholic hymn.

The hymn converts it from a prayer by an individual into a prayer by a congregation. Sadly, I can’t find anywhere who did that translation. Theological concerns aside, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that anonymous Catholic wanted to convert the “I with Thee one” into “I one with thee” as much as they wanted to open the hymn to the female half of the congregation. I don’t know about UK English, but the original is very clunky in American English.

I’d also add that saying that you personally are God’s son might not be entirely appropriate despite it being true for half the population. It would certainly be more than a bit odd for all of God’s daughters. There are, however, several wonderful renditions on YouTube with the original lyrics—including by female singers. So while I agree that the changes found in the St. Michael Hymnal version are a good idea, I find it hard to fault the Petersens for disagreeing with me on this issue, or any of the other wonderful singers I’ve included in the links below.

My view comes from a Catholic layman’s perspective, of course, not Church of Ireland or Church of England. Further, there is Biblical precedent for a universal sonship.

Far more interesting are two other changes, one thematic and one metric, in the third verse (the fifth stanza of the original). In the original, the first line of the final stanza is “High King of heav’n, when the battle is done…”. “High King of heaven” is almost certainly a play on High King of Ireland, but it fits perfectly into Catholic theology so it stays. But the line is not unaltered:

High King of heaven, when vict’ry is won,

Changing this from “when the battle is done” is both a metrical change and a change in meaning. The original’s play on the high kings of Ireland was likely also a play on the many battles among Ireland’s kings, win or lose. As a hymn, the High King of Heaven will have his victory. He is not one king among many. He is the One King.

The anonymous translator also appears to have tried to maintain the meter of that line. “When the battle is done” has an extra syllable in it compared to the previous two (four in the original) verses. The change from battle to victory returns the line to the “correct” number of syllables, by glossing over victory’s middle syllable.

I notice that even those who choose to sing about being God’s son use the “vict’ry” line.

There is an opposite change in the third line of that verse. The first half of that line always has five syllables in the original. But it also always has one word for those last two notes. Always, that is, until the fifth verse, where those two notes are broken into two words, “own heart”. The word “own” is a nonce word often used by poets to maintain meter. There’s no difference in meaning between “my heart” and “my own heart”. Poetry doesn’t have a literal melody, it gets such melody as it has from its meter, which is why poets love nonce words. This isn’t necessary in a hymn.

So, “heart of my own heart” gets simplified into “heart of my heart”, and as an added benefit “heart” becomes one word, more emphasized by its spread into two notes.

Whatever lyrics you use, and whatever song you prefer to sing to the melody, you can play the melody using the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts on the note files I’ve provided. Here’s the command I use to generate music from those files on the command line:

Each of those text files is in the download (Zip file, 2.5 MB), but here’s amen.txt as an example:

It’s a nice little stinger, easily recognizable as one of the many ways of singing Amen to end a hymn. If you’re not familiar with the way the piano script works, the lines beginning with a pound symbol are ignored by the script. The lines “prestissimo” and “--key F+” tell the script how fast to play and what key to play in—it will automatically add in the appropriate sharps and flats of that key. In this case, it’s the key of F Major, which has one flat, the B.

The number “1” sets the default length of notes to be a whole note. The letters are the notes they represent; enclosing them in brackets means to play them simultaneously with the notes not in brackets, and putting them in quotes means to play them as chords. Dashes drop down an octave. If you look at the sheet music (PNG, 170.1 KB) it should all be, if not obvious, decipherable.

I used the script to save each part as a MIDI file and then imported them into GarageBand to assign instruments to them. The instruments used are Fairytales Bells and Granular Vibraphone for the first verse, and Cathedral Organ on both clefs for the second verse. The Amen uses Harp.

I’ve also provided an archive (Zip file, 2.5 MB) of the piano files, if you want to try your hand at using 42 Astounding Scripts’s piano script yourself. The archive also contains the resulting MIDI files, and an MP3 file generated from them.