Lord, be my vision, supreme in my heart

Seen as a 20th-c text, the older form of this paraphrase (Be thou my vision …) has repeatedly been voted as one of the most popular hymns of the past 100 years. This may have something to do with a renewed interest in Celtic history and spirituality, since the Gaelic original is 1000 years old or more. The Irish verses beginning Rob tu mo bhoile, a Comdii cride were translated by Mary Byrne (Maire or Mairi ni Bhroin) for Eriu, the Journal of the School of Irish Learning, in 1905, as ‘A Prayer’. Part of this prose text was put into verse by Eleanor Hull in 1912, in her Poem-book of the Gael, where it is printed in couplets. The Irish Church Hymnal of 1919 brought this to wider notice, and in 1927 the Revised Church Hymnary made the decisive choice of SLANE for the music. The Companion to Rejoice and Sing (qv for further detail) notes that the hymn ‘suffers from an excess of metrical irregularities’, leading to a further surfeit of editorial trimming to assist the fluency of congregational singing. Apart from the 1st line, the most distinctive features of the present version come at 1.2 (from ‘naught be all else to me, save that thou art’); 3.1 (‘Be thou my breastplate …’); 4.3–4 (‘Thou and thou only, the first in my heart/ High King of heaven, my treasure thou art’); and 5.1–2 (‘… when the battle is done/ grant heaven’s joy to me …’—a line requiring ‘heaven’ to be sung as one syllable and as two in the same line). Some of these changes were made for HTC, together with others which are not adopted here. The ‘vision’ remains as an opening and closing motif.

Like the words, the tune SLANE is a relatively modern rediscovery of a much older work, in this case a traditional Irish melody found in the 1909 Old Irish Folk Music and Songs … hitherto Unpublished edited by Patrick W Joyce, accompanying ‘With my love come on the road’. As well as the books noted above, Songs of Praise Enlarged (1931) further promoted the tune when it was set to Jan Struther’s Lord of all hopefulness. Since then Jack Winslow, Margaret Clarkson (848, a different arrangement) and Timothy Dudley- Smith have all used it for new words, and it has proved temptingly (sometimes fatally) attractive to several other authors. The metre given, in this case 10 10 10 10, depends on the variations in the chosen text. Slane is the name of a hill some ten miles from Tara in Ireland’s Co Meath, connected with a legend about Patrick.

(Maire ni Bhroin), b Dublin 1880, d Dublin 1931. The Dominican Convent Sch, Eccles St, Dublin, and the Univ of Ireland (MA, 1st cl); she worked as an examiner and researcher in Irish for the Board of Intermediate Education, and became a distinguished scholar in the ancient Gaelic and Irish languages. She also examined candidates for the Civil Service Commission, in Irish. Among several related and published studies she compiled the Catalogue of what was then the Royal Irish Academy, and contributed to its Old and Mid-Irish Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Irish Language. Her best-known popular work remains the underlying translated text for Dr Eleanor Hull’s metrical version used here. No.732.

b Cheetham, nr Manchester 1860, d Wimbledon, Surrey 1935. Alexandra Coll, and the Royal Coll of Science, both in Dublin. Her interest in the Celtic tradition led her to become the first London Secretary of the Irish Text Soc which she founded in 1899, and to serve as president of the Irish Literary Soc in London. She wrote widely on Irish history and literature, and in 1931 received an Hon Litt.D from the National Univ of Ireland. Her best-known publication was the Poem-Book of the Gael (1912), and she also contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Apart from her acclaimed (though much-varied) version of Mary Byrne’s text included here, one other of her translations features in the 2005 Church Hymnal of the Ch of Ireland. At the time of her death she was engaged in editing a series of Lives of the Celtic Saints. No.732.