A Translated Hymn

Having refrained from verse more or less successfully for twenty years, or it might be only fifteen, I was seized with a certain impulse on re-reading the hymns in The Dream of Gerontius. An impulse is not the same as a well-considered reason for doing things, and so is not easy to define, but as well as I can analyse it, it was to this effect: That theology-that unwrought mine of poetry, as Patmore calls it-is by no means represented in our hymns except by fits and starts, and what we want, says impulse, is the cycle complete. See what Newman has done in his choir of Angelicals in surveying the subject from the nebular hypothesis right away to Purgatory. God wills it! Be a crusader, do one pillar of the temple-no one can do them all, but if you stir, someone else will do so too. Thus I began to find out some of the many, many things which mere critics never suspect: e.g. that a hymn, and a very good one, might be based on, say, the nature of efficacious grace, if only one could keep the subject long enough in solution in the alembic of imaginative experience. But there is the difficulty. It is only by a series of cosmic accidents that such things can arise, like the making of minerals, especially of that very condensed vegetable the diamond. So while we leave these processes to themselves, we must translate, translate, translate. This is the only feasible way of producing anything like a cycle of vernacular hymns. Songs, lyrics, more sacred or less, the vernacular is producing, has produced, but these fill no gaps in the cycle. This was Faber's failure

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