Light of Gladness

Lights at the Candlemas service,
Drighlington St Paul, 2020

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another evening hymn by Christopher Idle, ‘Light of gladness, Lord of glory’. It is set here to the tune ‘Quem pastores laudavere’. The tune, whose name refers to shepherds, is not surprisingly in the form of a berceuse (pastoral chant or lullaby), also appropriate for an evening hymn.

The words are a setting of the ancient evening hymn ‘Phos hilaron’ (light of joy) which is usually thought of as an evening hymn, though there is only a passing reference to evening. Maybe the intention is to contrast the fading of daylight with the eternal light of Christ.

The first and last verses praise Jesus specifically, addressed first as ‘light of gladness, Lord of glory’ and asking him to ‘shine on us in your mercy’, and later as Son of God, with no petition but praising him as the one whose light shall never grow dim.  In between is a doxology (‘Father, Son and Spirit praising with the holy Seraphim’), which usually would come at the end of the hymn: is this the order of the Greek original, I wonder?

The rhyming scheme is unusual:  the first three lines of each verse are mostly half-rhymes (glory/holy/mercy, descending/evening/praising, ages/praises/ceases) and the last lines of the three verses form a rhyming set (hymn/seraphim/dim).

One thought on “Light of Gladness”

  1. The text of Phos Hilaron, together with information about how it was traditionally used, can be found on Wikipedia (and other places), and, yes, the mention of the Trinity in the second verse rather than at the end is part of the Greek text, and Christopher Idle is faithfully reproducing this here. And yes, I did find it odd to be singing it in the morning, because it definitely has an evening context as one sings it. (But, of course, Stephen didn’t design the programme for Morning Prayer in particular, but just to sing through the book at the rate of one a day.)

    And I suppose I don’t find the rhyme-structure all that unusual: two other hymns that follow the same kind of structure are “Three in one and one in three” and “For all the saints who from their labours rest” – although in both those cases the idea of the final lines of all the verses rhyming is achieved by making them all end on the same word.

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