New every morning is the love

I have a small Church of Ireland Book of Common Prayer with a hymnal that I brought along for devotional reading. I like it because the poems aren’t spread out at the mercy of the tyrannous music but rest in neat stanzas. I also like it for its shape and because, it being an old Anglican hymnal, the hymns are good ones.

I like this one especially for the way the thought is developed from stanza to stanza and for things like the list in the second stanza which he brings to a conclusion with the subtle switch in the internal rhyme of the O’s and F’s in ‘forgiven’ and ‘of heaven.’ Or the W’s and LL’s in the second line of the third—music it is almost an insult to set to other music. It is the kind of poem one can keep finding things to notice—not neat things to gawk at—that illuminate the meaning. This chap knew how to write poetry perhaps better than your average hymn writer (except the third line of the last stanza is pretty average, but by then one can forgive him and the meaning is sound), and he obviously had a pretty good grasp of practical theology.

New every morning is the love
our wakening and uprising prove;
through sleep and darkness safely brought,
restored to life and power and thought.

New mercies, each returning day,
hover around us while we pray;
new perils past, new sins forgiven,
new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

If on our daily course our mind
be set to hallow all we find,
new treasures still, of countless price,
God will provide for sacrifice.

Old friends, old scenes, will lovelier be,
as more of heaven in each we see;
some softening gleam of love and prayer
shall dawn on every cross and care.

The trivial round, the common task,
will furnish all we ought to ask:
room to deny ourselves; a road
to bring us daily nearer God.

Only, O Lord, in thy dear love,
fit us for perfect rest above;
and help us, this and every day,
to live more nearly as we pray.

—John Keble, 1822