Do you know the hymn text “Morning Glory, Starlit Sky”?
I didn’t until a few month ago, when my friend Crawford literally read it to me on the phone.
For the first couple lines I was like, “Hm, well that’s nice?” But then! Lines like this: “Love that gives, gives ever more, gives with zeal, with eager hands, spares not, keeps not, all outpours, ventures all, its all expends.”
So, so, good.
Here’s the trouble. As written, the hymn text is 6 stanzas. And with its most common hymn tune pairings, like MONKLAND and SONG 13, it’s still…6 stanzas.
And I just find that tedious, so I got out my handydandy metrical index to look for other options.
As you could tell from the title of this blog post, ABERYSTWYTH is the answer.
The hymn ends up being 3 stanzas, instead of 6 stanzas, so that’s good.
Even better: the “Morning Glory, Starlit Sky” groups thematically into these 3 parts.
And better still: the shift midway through the tune to briefly tonicize the relative major? It aligns with the openings of “Morning Glory’s” 2nd, 4th, and 6th stanzas. For the 2nd and 6th poetic stanzas in particular, that tonicization highlights an important thematic progression in the text.
Win.Win.Win.
Here’s a link to the text, which is under copyright but reprinted with permission at Hymnary. And here’s a link to the tune.
Give it a sing-through and see if you like it as much as I do.
Any favorite hymn tune and text combos that you think more people should know about?
