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Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Christ be the Lord of all our days” by Timothy Dudley-Smith. John indicated that it was originally written with the tune ‘Repton’ (‘Dear Lord an Father’) and used that instead of tune ‘Cloth Fair’ in the book.
As the first word hints, this is all about Christ. Each verse focuses on one aspect of his relationship with us. The first, ‘Lord of all our days … of our unremembered birth … of our griefs and fears’, reminds us that he is with us throughout our lives whether known and remembered or not.
In the second verse, Christ is ‘Source of all our deeds ..the fount [of] springs of love … the ground of all our prayers’. Source, fount, ground all suggest a priority: it is the existence and love of Christ that should motivate our actions, rather than us turning to him once we’ve decided what to do. But it’s not easy to make a habit of that.
In the third verse, which logically perhaps should be the last but isn’t, Christ is ‘the goal of all our hopes, the end to whom we come … our many-mansioned home’. If he initiates our actions, from our ‘unremembered birth’ then he is also the one to whom we come at the hour of our death.
Finally, he is ‘the vision of our lives … light of everlasting light, the bright and morning star’. In between birth and death, it is Christ who should illuminate those actions that he has already prompted and that will lead us home to him.
Yes, in his “Lift every heart” (Collected hymns 1961-83, p207) Timothy Dudley-Smith gives the date (1975) and tune (Repton) for this hymn and a paragraph about its writing.
I must confess I was a bit disappointed in this hymn, particularly in its third and fourth lines, where it seems to me the fourth line is often out-of-character from the rest of the verse. When he discusses “A purple robe” (p197 of the book – the hymn is no. 62 in Sing Praise) he says he considered adding a fifth line to the four lines of each verse, and explains what they would have been, but as David Wilson had already written a tune to the four-line version by then he abandoned the project. I wondered if he had done the same with this hymn and carried the project through, because I think the hymn would be much improved if line 4 was missed out of each verse and the hymn became a simple Common Meter lyric. Well, actually that wouldn’t work for verse 3 without a change to line 5 as well – but the phrase “many-mansioned” has an artificial feel to it, and simply to write “guide of each pilgrim Christian soul / which seeks our heavenly home” would work just as well. The hymn would be simpler and shorter, but better as well in my view!
And about the tune “Cloth fair”, it has a large number of sevenths in its harmony. A standard text-book on musical composition gives composers the advice that the tonic key should be firmly established before one embarks on departures from it, and I think this tune meanders too much in the complexities of its harmonies. It too could do with simplification.