One of my favourite hymns starts ‘Come Down O Love Divine’. It struck me recently that this hymn is a prayer that anyone could make their own, certainly if they believe in a loving God, whatever their faith.
The lyrics date back to an Italian poem by a mystic from Siena in the 14th Century. It was not translated into English until late 19th Century, but its popularity was assured only after it appeared in the first edition of English Hymnal at the turn of the 20th Century. In Churches it is sung quite often, but especially at festivals like Pentecost and special events like weddings, Baptisms and Confirmation.
The first verse is simply an invocation of the Divine Love to come into our hearts so that lit by it we may shine:
Come down, O Love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
It is the third verse that moves me most:
Let holy charity mine outward vesture be, and lowliness become my inner clothing; true lowliness of heart which takes the humbler part, and o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
Charity, as in the King James Version of the Bible, I take to mean agape, love. The world needs people who are humble at heart, filled with love and willing to stand alongside the lowly and the oppressed. This is surely something that can inspire all human beings, irrespective of their faith.
The final verse represents the longing of the human soul for God.
And so the yearning strong
with which the soul will long
shall far surpass the power of human telling;
for none can guess its grace
till we become the place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.
Here there is a reference to the Holy Spirit, which has a special significance for Christians, but a yearning for the Divine Presence within us, is not a strange concept in other religions either. Mystics of most religions talk about the soul’s longing for its Creator, or Source.
So, here we have a hymn, or poem, that helps us all to meditate on our calling to become a place where God himself can ‘make his dwelling’. The tune we sing it to is also interesting. It was composed by Ralph Vaughn Williams, for publication in the English Hymnal, and is known as Down Ampney.
‘Down Ampney’
The popular hymn Come Down O love Divine is usually sung to the tune called Down Ampney, composed by Ralph Vaugh Williams (RVW). Down Ampney is the name of a village in Gloucestershire, where RVW was born in 1872 and where his father was the Vicar. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Royal College of Music, he worked with many important composers of the 2oth Century, including Maurice Ravel, Max Bruch, Gustav Holst, Hubert Parry, and Charles V. Stanford, RVW became a prolific composer and wrote an enormous variety of musical works, from Symphonies to choral and solo vocal pieces, songs, motets, and even film music. Most of our readers will be familiar with the haunting music of ‘The Lark Ascending’, with the high- soaring violin part. He loved poetry and has set many poems to music.
He fought in the first World War and was deeply affected by his experiences. His major choral, anti-war work, ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’, has a section consisting of a Walt Whitman poem in its entirety.
Although a self-confessed agnostic, RVW has written a huge amount of religious music, including the motet ‘O Taste and See how Gracious the Lord is’ , written for the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth. It is said that RVW broke loose from the tight influence of Continental music on the music scene in England. He was greatly influenced by English folk music, which he collected assiduously. So, for example, the well- loved Christmas carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem’ was an English traditional melody, and the Easter hymn, ’Christ the Lord is Risen Again’, a French medieval melody, both harmonised by him.
As he was the co-editor of the first English Hymnal, he had plenty of opportunity to exercise his love of church music. Well worth a mention among the thirty or so attributions to him in the New English Hymnal are, ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say, Come Unto me and Rest’ with its unmistakably folksy lilts and Chesterton’s poem ‘O God of Earth and Altar’ set to an ‘English melody’ that is both a lament and a cry for help.
October 2022 sees the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaugh Williams. I suspect we shall be hearing a lot more about him and his work in the months to come.
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