Best Loved Hymns and Readings. Martin Manser

fear no foe with Thee at hand to bless:

      Ills have no weight and tears no bitterness: Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph still if Thou abide with me.

      Hold then Thy cross before my closing eyes!

      Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies! Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee: In life and death, O Lord, abide with me!

       Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847)

       Adam and Eva

       This passage from. Genesis 2:18-24 is sometimes used as a Bible reading at weddings. It illustrates the mutual companionship and interdependence that exist in a marriage relationship.

      Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

       Adonais

       Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lament for fellow-poet John Keats ranks among his most celebrated poetic works. Written in 1821 in response to the news of Keats’s premature death from consumption in Rome, it is often quoted in part or in full at funerals (the extracts below comprise the more famous passages).

       Many have commented upon the melancholy prescience of the final stanza in which Shelley describes how his own spirit is ‘driven far from the shore’: the following year he was himself drowned in a sudden storm while sailing in the bay of Lerici.

      Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep;

      He hath awakened from the dream of life. ‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with out spirit’s knife Invulnerable nothings. We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

      He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

      Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight, Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world’s slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain; Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn, With sparkles ashes load an unlamented urn.

      He is made one with Nature; there is heard

      His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

      He is a portion of the loveliness

      Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull, dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear, Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight To its own likeness, as each mass may bear, And bursting in its beauty and its might From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.

      The One remains, the many change and pass;

      Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled! Rome’s azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

      That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

      That Beauty in which all things work and move, That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which, through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

      The breath whose might I have invoked in song

      Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

       Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

       Afterwards

       This meditation by the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy upon the way a person might be remembered after they have died remains one of his most popular poetic works. It is sometimes recited at funerals.

      When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous

       stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

      If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

      The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, ‘To him this must have been a familiar sight’.

      If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

      When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone’.

      If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

      Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

      And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

      And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom, ‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

       Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

       All creatures of our God and King

       The words for this famous hymn were based upon lines written by St Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). Legend has it that the first four verses were inspired by the saint’s experiences after spending forty nights in a rat-infested hut at San Damiano. The fifth verse supposedly resulted from a quarrel between the church and civil authorities of Assisi, while the sixth stanza was written as the saint endured great suffering on his deathbed.

       William Henry Draper, rector of a parish in Yorkshire, subsequently produced his celebrated translation of St Francis’s words for a Whitsuntide