Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Now as the evening shadows fall”. The words are a paraphrase by the 20th century composer Michael Forster of an ancient text, the medieval Compline hymn usually rendered in English as “Before the ending of the day”. Compline was the last of the monastic prayer times and so the psalms, prayers and hymns that are regularly used in the service are intended to help us put ourselves right with God and relax into his presence as we go to bed. Forster’s paraphrase is a comforting one, asking God to help us to trust his grace, and to find “in sleep’s release, bodily rest and inner peace”.
What it is missing is the edginess of the older translations where the darkness of night is seen as the domain of the evil one, from whom we need protection: the words of verse two “Help us to find in sleep’s release, bodily rest and inner peace; may the darkness of the night refresh our eyes for morning light” is a far cry from the traditional rendering “From evil dreams defend our sight, from fears and terrors of the night; tread under foot our ghostly foe, that no pollution we may know”. The Latin originals (there is more than one version) are even starker, one of them referring to ‘phantasms’ and asking ‘ne polluantur corpora’ – let not my body be polluted.
The tune is called Blackheath, which is an area of London close to where I used to live. I have happy memories of evenings on the heath, whether sitting on the grass in summer with a pint of beer in a plastic tumbler from one of the pubs along the edge of the heath, watching fireworks, or during the 2012 London Olympics, with hundreds of other people sitting on deckchairs watching the action on a big screen. But I’ve chosen this image of Blackheath in the evening with a funfair. People go on funfair rides to scare themselves, or at least work up excitement (these rides of a travelling fair aren’t as scary as those in a permanent attraction such as Alton Towers). But the fun is perhaps more about coming off the rides at the end of the evening, celebrating having survived the scary experience (maybe with that drink from the bar) and going home happy.
Perhaps that is what Compline is about: we bring to God our excitement, the emotional rollercoaster of the day and sometimes maybe even fear of what the night or the next day might bring, and ask him to take those from us so that we can relax into him and into sleep. At the end of this translation are the lines “Grant us the faith that sets us free to praise you for eternity”. Amen.
In my opinion, this is the most successful modern paraphrase of “Te lucis ante terminum” that I have come across, and for me it is one of the highlights of the book so far. (And I think the opposite from Stephen about verse 2.) I first came across the hymn at Compline at a church run by Franciscan Friars when I was a student, at which Neale’s translation (which can be found on Wikipedia) was used.
* In verse 1, whereas the original and Neale’s translation both ask God to guard and keep us, and thus suggest that he might not (even though Neale does add the word “wonted” which means God has been accustomed so far to guarding and keeping us), this version instead states that God’s grace towards us is constant, and the problem lies not in whether he will keep faithful but in whether we will keep relying on him. I think that’s a much more helpful prayer, and to me it says something fundamental about faith: that God is reliable and the issue is our response to him.
* In verse 2, the “noctium phantasmata” of the original have given rise to a variety of ways of bringing ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night into various translations, and Neale’s is no exception. Well, I find all these things unhelpful, and the idea of naming them out loud before going to bed only encourages one to dream of them more vividly! Stephen is right to say the Latin has been toned down by Neale and others, but I think a fresh approach is needed. I think Forster has hit the nail on the head: in praying for a good night’s sleep of refreshment and rest, we should focus on the positive outcomes we desire – “bodily rest and inner peace” and refreshment for tired eyes so that we may embrace the morning with new enthusiasm – these are altogether more wholesome.
* In verse 3, Neale along with most others gets hung up over the word “done” (may these things be DONE) and has to rhyme it with the w0rd “Son”, thus forcing the naming of the Trinity to spill over into line 3 and occupy virtually the whole verse. Well, who could have believed that writing a doxology could be such a work of art? Forster’s version is altogether more positive – he still gets all the persons in, but with a purpose of re-orienting our lives in freedom and praise.
In conclusion, I think this is a brilliant hymn-text!
I don’t know why the set tune is called Blackheath. But the reasons I didn’t use it in singing the hymn are that I think that (i) the high D in the second line is unintuitive and the drop of the fourth also unintuitive, and (ii) the slurred quavers in the last line are unhelpful. A Compline hymn tune has to have a melody which can be sung solidly without an accompaniment and by singers who aren’t particularly gifted, and it needs therefore to have a very simple and memorable shape. Having line 2 echo the shape of line 1 exactly (rather than with changes) is desirable, and giving each syllable one note is desirable. So that’s what I tried to do.