PNR 282, March-April 2025
I have spent recent weeks in the company of Charles Wesley. I happened upon his obelisk in Marylebone High Street, and then realised, week after week, that as many as a third of the hymns we sing at St John’s Church, Buxton, were written by him. He composed over 6,000 hymns – some say 6,500 – which is almost as many hymns as Emily Dickinson wrote poems. His hymns (like some of her poems) are deeply rooted in scripture, generally follow a narrative, and can be ordered into a kind of Christian Year. Wesley was something of a hymn cannibal, working with other people’s lines and tunes, and his own work was itself cannibalised and transformed. John Wesley, introducing the hymns of both brothers, authorised their use by any Christian church so long as the words weren’t altered. But they were and are.
Some poems become hymns, notable poems like ‘My soul, there is a country’ by Vaughan. But the idea of the hymn as a poem is more problematic – a poem which aspires to leave its author behind, which has a collective voice and belongs to a communion.