Let’s Write a Hymn
By Glen Nelson
I found myself writing texts for composers by happy accident. I had published some poetry, composer friends saw it, and they said, “Hey, let’s write together.” Since then, I’ve written lyrics, poetry, and librettos for hymns, children’s songs, cantatas, oratorios, art song cycles, and several operas. If you’ve ever thought about writing the words for a hymn, I hope that this article will be of use to you. There are some excellent essays online about the spiritual side of creating these things, but I want to do something different today with you: this is about the technique of writing a hymn text, itself.
Writing a hymn text is not the same as writing the lyrics of a popular song or a piece of musical theater. It’s not like writing poetry, either. Certainly, it’s not like writing prose. It’s technically demanding and specific, and if everything goes just right, people won’t know how hard you worked to get it to feel so easy and natural. This article has three section topics: meter, rhyme, and imagery.
1. Keep an Eye on Accents
Poets know all about meter, about accented and unaccented syllables in a line, but most of the rest of us rarely think about it, let alone count and analyze it. A quick primer: When you speak, you place stress on some syllables and not others. Sometimes the voice raises or lowers when you’re emphasizing those syllables, and sometimes they’re spoken louder or softer than the syllables around them. Take this sentence, “I really love potato chips.” (It’s true. I do love them. Note my accent of the word “do,” for extra emphasis.) When I speak naturally, the accents of the sentence fall like this:
I reál- ly lóve po- tá- to chips.
There are eight syllables in the line. The accented syllables are on the second, fourth, and sixth syllables. It would sound strange to accent other syllables in the sentence. I wouldn’t say,
I reál- ly love pó- ta- tó chips.
It would sound odd and unnatural to have accents on syllables 2, 5 and 7, you see? You say po-TAY-to, I say po-TAH-to; nobody says PO-tay-TO. There’s a natural rhythm to all speech, a musicality to it. We don’t think about it very often, but it’s there. When you write lyrics though, you have to think about it.
This is especially important when you are writing a hymn because in a multi-verse hymn that has the identical melody for each verse, you are locked into its rhythmic patterns. The music is set on repeat, and it can’t readjust to your inconsistent rhythms. It would be as awkward as forcing the singer to sing “PO-tay-TO.” They could do it, but they would be very self-conscious about it, and listeners would no longer be thinking about the deliciousness of my favorite food, would they? In a hymn text, the accents of the first eight syllables in the line of the first verse, for example, will have the exact same pattern of accents in every other verse. At least, that’s the ideal.
When a composer is setting text to music, he or she will have a sensitive ear attuned to accented syllables and to something else: the natural rising and falling of pitches in normal speech. “It’s a beautiful day today,” has a melodic line baked into it, for example. Say it out loud three times, each time slower and more expansively, “It’s a beautiful day today,…” It’s almost like you can just say it and music finds its way to attach itself. And so it is with everything in written and spoken language, even things that were never intended to be sung. Can the composer ignore those natural musicalities? Of course, and sometimes it’s interesting when they do. But the farther they get away from the inherent rhythms and pitches of speech as they set texts to music, the more manipulated it will sound. That could be good, but in hymns, it’s usually an unwelcome complication that undermines the words’ directness and sincerity. And what are hymns if not sincere?
Let’s look at hymns in our hymnal. If you were to say the words, “I need thee every hour, most gracious Lord” in a prayer on your knees at bedtime, your natural accents would be very much like Robert Lowery set to music in the hymn:
I néed thee év- ery hóur, Most grá- cious Lórd.
Each verse that Annie S. Hawkes wrote for that work follows the same general pattern, “…In jóy or páin” or “…Most hó- ly Óne.” It does not have additional syllables either. It does not say, “…In happiness or pain.” A deviation in the number of syllables wouldn’t fit the existing pattern. It’s obvious, but once you’re syllabically aware—that’s probably not a legit phrase; how about metrics-minded?—you’re halfway there.
Pity the writer who has to translate hymn texts from one language to another—an almost impossibly difficult job because, well, because it just is. Now think what it must be like to only know these hymns that were originally in English through foreign language translation. Back to our discussion.
In all of the projects I’ve written, the words have come before the music. That is, I’ve delivered the finished texts to the composer, who then set them to music. Well, there was one song I wrote to celebrate the Church’s history in New York City, and I took the hymn, “Utah, We Love Thee” and turned it into “New York, We Love Thee!” I can’t find a copy of it now, but I remember how hard it was to find words that rhymed with “Sondheim.” Anyway, writing text first is easier for me and harder for the composer, maybe, but I’m not sure I could do it the other way around very effectively.
I suspect that most of our LDS hymns were written, words first, but when you come across an exception that really soars, you have to just sit back and marvel. My favorite example of this in our hymnal is Karen Lynn Davidson’s “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown,” whose text is fit to the glorious tune by Hans Leo Hassler that Bach used throughout his St. Matthew Passion.
As you write lyrics for hymns, you’ll likely go first, too. My advice is to be strict about meter. Definitely be sure that every verse has the same number of syllables as the verse that comes before and after it, and if you take this seriously, have the stressed syllables align exactly from verse to verse, too.
2. Rhyme
You might think that I’m going to get all judgy and proscriptive about end-rhymes—those are the repeating sounds of the syllables at the ends of lines of text. Two quick examples:
More holiness give me, More strivings within,
More patience in suff’ring, More sorrow for sin.
Far, far away on Judea’s plains,
Shepherds of old heard the joyous strains:
You might expect that from me, but I’m not too hung up on it. Just like contemporary poetry that has gone from a reliance on end rhyme centuries ago to something more free-flowing and prose-like today, contemporary hymn texts may be a bit liberated from rhyme, too. However, one way or another, they do require cadence. The lines have to flow in a patterned way. We are in a world of songs that are becoming less rigid in their rhyming. Hip hop, Country, Pop, and Broadway songs might have once been very precise in this regard, but it’s common (and useful) now to use slant rhyme—line end sounds that are close enough to feel related without being an exact match—or no rhyme at all.
Even though I would encourage you to be a vigilant rhymer, the bigger mistake, it seems to me, is to be boring and predictable. Is there anything worse that listening to a song for the first time and knowing in advance exactly how every line is going to rhyme? “Moon, June, croon, swoon.” Why bother writing that? I feel sorry for the wasted ink.
Around 2018, I was asked by a fine composer named Ethan Wickman, who is LDS, to write a hymn for submission to the Church’s new hymnbook. (Eventually 16,000 works would be submitted from over 66 countries.) I didn’t really spend too much time worrying about being accepted or not. However, to me it wasn’t worth the effort to do something unless I was really proud of it, given that the odds for inclusion would be pretty small no matter how fine our efforts turned out. So I decided to give myself a problem to solve.
Instead of referring to scriptures and gospel concepts in my hymn text, what if I used an actual scripture, straight from the Bible? And not just a few words from it, but an entire verse? I didn’t know what would happen, but I thought it might be interesting to find out.
I landed on the passage from John 17:21, which I find remarkable in English on many levels, including the unusual pattern of its language: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” It already has a couple of rhymes in it that give it a loose structure, “in thee,” and “sent me.” Hmm, I thought, maybe it could work.
I divided the scriptural verse into four lines, like this:
That they all may be one; as thou,
Father, art in me, and I in thee
That they also may be one in us:
That the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
Since it was for a hymn text, and given that I needed it to align with the rhythms of multiple verses with the exact repeating patterns of the music that Ethan would write later, I needed to analyze the accents of the syllables in the scriptural verse in order to repeat them in my own additional verses. With me, so far?
Thematically, I wanted to explore something more: How does someone today internalize a verse of scripture? That is, after reading the sacred works, what comes next? So I asked myself that question: What should follow a scripture? How do I respond to verse 21 of being “one” when I see sadly very little of that in the world today? I wondered how could I make the text feel like a living, breathing person is talking. That was important to me, too.
I’ll leave it to you to determine whether I did a good job. I submitted to Ethan the first verse, above, along with these following two verses.
After the scripture, a question for God:
And yet how to be one, we ask
Father, when we all are unalike,
When our differences of heart and mind
Fill the world with distrust, to fear or to fight?
Then a plea and resolve:
Grant us Father, a love for all.
Number, feed, and gather us to thee
That whatever tongue we speak or hear
With one voice and one soul, we praise and love thee.
I sent off to him my three verses of text. I can’t remember whether Ethan wanted me to change anything—I don’t think he did—and he sent me back a finished hymn score very quickly, as I recall. I played it on the piano and sang along. I loved it immediately. (If you are a writer, my hope for you is to find a composer as wonderful with whom to collaborate as Ethan.)
Want to hear it? During Covid lockdown, the talented Wickman family recorded this four-part hymn a cappella with split screens at home, which they edited together and posted on YouTube for Easter. (Mental note to composers: it’s handy to marry musicians and raise musical children.)
3. Imagery and other poetics
If you think about your favorite recorded songs, the ones that played during important moments in your life, and you look at the lyrics of those songs, I suspect that you’ll find words that conjured up pictures in your mind: “Rows and flows of angel hair,” “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it,” “All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray,” “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry,” “Popcorn popping on the apricot tree,” and so on. The imagery makes them memorable. And the opposite of memorable is generic.
Unfortunately, it is easy to write hymn texts that are generic and forgettable. Maybe they make statements of belief. They teach lessons. They are “true” in that sense, but they fail to accomplish all they could if they elevated the poetics just a little. You might think that if your goal is to be universal, it would be disadvantageous to be specific with imagery. I disagree with that, although there are limits. I have no idea what a translator would do with images like our hymnal’s: “more freedom from earth-stains” or “when in the sultry glebe I faint.” I think that when you are speaking personally and honestly, and you can describe a physical thing or idea beautifully, people will identify with you, even if your identity is different from theirs.
Flip through the hymnbook sometime and stop at your favorites. What are the images in them? Here are some that pop out to me:
The veil o’er the earth is beginning to burst
A banner is unfurled
I saw a mighty angel fly
To lighten our minds with its rays
Radiant beamed the sun above
The tokens in his hands I knew
We’ll make the air with music ring
The night is dark, and I am far from home
Our brains are built on the ability to remember stories. Stories stick more than sermons do. Likewise, images rise above mere declarations, regardless of their good intentions.
An alternative to poetic imagery in a hymn text is a writer’s willingness to be personal or to approach a familiar topic in a new way. In my “That They All May Be One” text, my attempt to be new was to say, essentially, “Well, that’s the scripture, and I get it, but how is that admonition to be one even possible today?” My goal was to force the reader/singer to question the timelessness of scripture and then seek a solution.
In poetics, syntax refers to the order of words in a line. In conversation I’d say (and have), “I love potato chips.” Speaking poetically, I guess I could say, “’Tis potato chips, I love,” although living in the 21st century, that kind of convolution falls flat with me. I’m rarely going for a throwback vintage construction or a Yoda vibe. This is a sore spot for some songwriters, and they may disagree with me, so I’ll leave you to it, but my advice is to get as close to natural syntax as you can.
There you have it. Three points of advice. Writing hymn texts accomplishes a couple of additional wonderful things for you, as a person. First, it helps you think about something important and to try to say something meaningful about it. Second, it gives you more profound insight into other hymns and will make the singing of those works—in a sacred setting or on your way to grab a sandwich after work (potato chips on the side)—a more artful, moving, and memorable experience.
