Light of the World, true light divine

We are approaching the end of the extended season of Christmas/Epiphany, which is marked by Candlemas on 2 February (next Tuesday).  So I’m starting a short series of hymns and songs around that theme.  The first, “Light of the world, true light divine” does indeed look back to Christmas – which for many people will be a distant memory by now – with a reminder of the baby Jesus in the manger, and hailing him as the “long awaited light”, which is essentially what Candlemas celebrates. 

But this point in the Christian year is very much a pivot point as we turn away from reflecting on Jesus’ birth and begin to look forward in anticipation to the events of Holy Week, which this year falls around the beginning of April.  There are hints of this in the words of the hymn: “Life of the world, a life laid down, who chose the cross before the crown” (v.2) and “you came to set a lost world right” (v.3).

One thought on “Light of the World, true light divine”

  1. As this hymn-singing project develops I am growing ever more puzzled by the way the book is “structured thematically” (as claimed on page ix paragraph 2 of its preface). I agree with all the words of this hymn, and to me it has a straightforward “Christmas” theme. It rightly looks forward from the crib to the cross, and (as Stephen says) it cites Jesus’ death for us as the reason that he is so highly exalted. It is in the best tradition of carols such as Hark the herald and Once in royal, and also more modern Christmas items such as Kendrick’s “Look to the skies”.

    But it makes no reference to the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Unlike the next hymn (33 New life has dawned) it cannot even be argued that this is an Epiphany hymn, as it makes no reference to any of the other events which come under the Epiphany lectionary provision.

    I feel sure in my own mind that Timothy Dudley-Smith would have had in mind one of the more traditional 8.8.6.8.8.6 tunes in Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised – probably “Cornwall” by S S Wesley (to which Charles Wesley’s “O love divine, how sweet thou art” is usually sung), but there are 5 others of the same meter. The flow of the sense of the words, relying as it does on rather long sentences and a structure where one has to consider several lines together to discern the meaning, naturally calls for a tune which takes the words slowly, which spaces them out fairly evenly, and which allows choirs to sing a different harmony to each chord. In fact, in the music edition it is hard to grasp the sense of the words overall: one really needs each verse set out as a stanza on its own.

    So, sitting down to sing it, I naturally looked for one of these tunes first, rather than Anne Harrison’s tune, which has a distinctly contemporary lilt to it, a narrow avoidance of parallel fifths between bass and melody at the half-way point, and other marks of the modern age. But I discovered, rather to my shock, that none of the 6 possibles in A&MR actually has what is needed. The meter is hard to write a convincing tune in. Each of them has points at which one would like to sing something else other than the note which is actually written. All of them would fall back into CM or LM were it not for the vigilance of the organist.

    Whereas Anne’s tune is actually quite gifted, in an annoying sort of way: it has the capacity to burrow its way into the subconscious and become an earworm. I must take my hat off to her and say how impressed I am! (Not that this will stop me trying to write a convincing “traditional” tune for the hymn, in time for next Christmas’ Carol Service!)

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