Knowing that many of our readers are of Christian origin, we want to highlight this small book that remembers hymns that began in Wales and then impacted the entire English-speaking Christian world. Many of our readers will know these hymns from church experiences past or present.
The University of Wales Press produced the book, but it’s easily available through distribution in North America. The design is captivating, with a dozen full-page black-and-white block print illustrations by Ruth Jen Evans that capture the emotions of reaching and yearning for what’s divine. All these hymn-poems are Christian, but with a sense of universality to the emotions of faith so that people of all faiths, or none, may benefit from them.
The Welsh originals appearing before their English translation may not be of much use to most readers, but they lend authenticity to the project.
After the texts are presented, there are several pages of historical background and spiritual reflection written by author M. Wynn Thomas, a professor at Swansea University in Wales. For the hymn, “To be alive is sheer wonder,” we learn, for example, that Ann Griffiths, who wrote it in the late eighteenth century, created “simply spontaneous improvisations, spur-of-the-moment effusions, deeply inward and contemplative in character. Ann herself never bothered to write them down.”
These are texts related closely to the mystical tradition. Thomas continues: “A maid who helped [Ann] with the milking was so struck that she committed them to memory, and they eventually made their way to paper. They have about them a visionary intensity akin to that found only in the writings of some of the great Christian mystics.” We also learn that the great twentieth-century Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas, once wrote: “God [was] in the throat of a bird. Ann heard him speak.”
Again, this is distinctively Christian. There are frequent references to “the cross” and “Calvary.” And there’s one unfortunate suggestion that a Christian hymn-writer improved on an Old Testament story because she “had the advantage over the original Jewish writers,” knowing Christ. But that’s the exception, here, not the rule.
We enjoyed the Welsh spirit, and universal language, in some of these poems.
“O You who gave to brook its tune and sigh to swaying trees,
O You, who gave to wind its moan and skylark’s flight its ease,
O save us from a day that brings a heart so hard it will not sing.”
Others discussed include the more familiar “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” by William Williams Pantycelyn.
