New hymn text for St Joseph

NihilNominis

Tune: ST CLEMENT

O Joseph, chosen earthly father
of Him Who fatherhood hath made:
Whose Son, perfecting thine example
the price of sin and death hath paid.

With trust in that angelic message,
thou tak’st the Queen of Heav’n as bride:
with trust like thine, thy Son, dear Joseph
brought forth the Church from His pierced side.

In silence keeping Mary’s honor,
thou paidst no heed to idle talk:
and in the strength of thine example
the wordless Lamb to Calvary walked.

With manful courage hast protected
that helpless Babe from heartless foe:
that He might live to die rejected,
and all His foes God’s Heart might know.

Thy tireless craftsmanship and labor
taught strength to human Hands divine
which, though nailed fast, found strength to fashion
rough beams into life-giving vines.

Thou diedst embracing Love, while Mary
in patient sorrow stayed by thee,
just as she stayed by Him, Who perished
with outstretched Arms embracing me.

O happy man, O man God-fearing,
O tree deep-rooted by Love’s stream:
through thee may I know years of plenty
when I awaken from life’s dream.

(c) 2025, Sean Connolly
CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

CHGiffen

Thank you for this, Sean. It is fittingly crafted and is an excellent addition to the works for St. Joseph.

Don9of11

@NihilNominis, I would like to make a few suggestions based on my own research and hymn collection to St. Joseph. I have never come across the archaic forms of words like "tak'st, paidst, or diedst" in any of the hymns I surveyed of St. Joseph.

"Thee, Thou, and Thy" are quite common and I have seen "deignest" and "reignest" in the hymn "Jesus! Let Me Call Thee Son." "Whilst" is found in the hymn "Holy Joseph, Dearest Father," and "sawest" in the hymn "Joseph! Our Certain Hope of Life," and "Didst" is found in the hymn "Great Saint Joseph! Son of David."

I'm not saying that the archaic forms of words don't have their place, but the three you have chosen are unpresedented. IMHO.

davido

Don, those words can be found in old British hymns.

NihilNominis

@Don9of11, I'm curious why you limited your search to hymns about St. Joseph? Why would these verb forms be specific to hymns to St. Joseph?

They are all precedented and attested in the literature.

I hesistate to say "well-attested" because it was indeed more common to make the informal 2nd person singular past tense with a helping verb and a participle, e.g. "didst pay," "hast died," but when the simple past is used with "thou", then the "-st" ending attaches to the regular past form.

I chose the forms I did for reasons of syllabic value and poetic rhythm. I think they are all readily understood.

I don't use "archaic" language just to be reactionary, to be clear. I find it handles the appositions and what I might call "tight writing" with greater clarity, and lends itself to certain conceptual rhymes and modes of expression that I find helpful, while remaining elegant and beautiful.

It is also simply more pleasant to sing "Thee" than "You", and since that's the common vector of address in my hymn texts, it's worth using the classic language, consistently and according to its own rules.

Nothing drives me battier than,

"O Jesus we adore You, / Who in Your love divine [....]
All praise and all thanksgiving be ev'ry moment THINE."

Don9of11

I'm curious why you limited your search to hymns about St. Joseph? Why would these verb forms be specific to hymns to St. Joseph?

Because your hymn is a hymn to St. Joseph. Secondly, as I explain in my bio on my website, In March of 2018 as the Feast of St. Joseph approached, I looked through our parish hymnal and was disappointed by the lack of devotional hymns to St. Joseph. So, I set about to gather as many hymns as I could from my collection of Catholic hymnals. My collection consist of 150 hymnals mostly from America, England, Ireland, Australia, and Scotland.

From this collection I conducted a survey of hymns to St. Joseph from which I composed a hymn book, "A Collection of Catholic Devotional Hymns to St. Joseph" which contain 14 of the most widely used hymns to St. Joseph. Only a few of the hymns contain the older form of text.

The St. Joseph hymn writers of old, who I believe were masters in poetry and Catechism, used such text like "Didst" and "Whilst" sparingly. As I said

I'm not saying that the archaic forms of words don't have their place, but the three you have chosen are unpresedented. IMHO.

That is they are not found in the hymns to St. Joseph that I surveyed.

That's all I am trying to say.

oldhymns

Over a period of many years, I have examined nearly all of the Catholic hymnals published in England since the time immediately following Catholic emancipation including Father Faber's HYMNS, which consists of 150 hymns. I have never seen words like "paidst" and "diedst" used in these publications or even in prayers or other spiritual (Catholic specifically) writings, and I think using them results in very stifling (unpleasant) reading/singing. Certainly there are much better word choices. As Don9of11 points out, the "hymn writers of old...used such text like 'Didst' and 'Whilst' sparingly."

I agree that "Thee" in most cases is a much better word choice than "You" and, as you say, results in more pleasant singing. On the other hand, I think it's awkward to say "diedst" or "hast died" when "has died" can work equally well.

I think the message of the hymn is beautiful, but most PIPs would have difficulty with the last verse.

MatthewRoth

“Older writers of hymns to Saint Joseph didn’t do this often” is not convincing, since older hymn writers did. Who cares that the Saint Joseph hymns are not by and large (slightly) archaic? I know that Kathy Pluth resists our use of archaic forms, but we just disagree there.

Diedst is awkward and I prefer the perfect (I consider it a perfect, but whatever we wish to call it, you know what I mean, with the auxiliary verb and participle). But I recognize that it becomes tricky to sing as you then lose a syllable elsewhere in the line.

NihilNominis

I'm not certain why grammatical English used consistently has become controversial at this particular moment.

I feel rather as I did back in my collegiate Hymnography class taught by a prominent member of the Hymn Society.

He was constantly raising he eyebrows at the texts I composed for my coursework, because he couldn't understand for the life of him why I would ever value the poetic harmony and theological richness of the monosyllabic juxtapositions of "God" and metonymic, collective "Man" more than the late-20th-century secular supervalue of gender-neutral, inclusive language, and he would constantly suggest replacing "Man" with terms like "Humanity," "Humankind," "People," etc.

I was a bit incredulous, and would attempt something like, "The reconciliation of God and Man in the Person of Jesus Christ the God-Man doesn't seem like an adequate reason to prefer those terms for expressing the relationship between the human and the divine in Christian hymnody to you?" But that got nowhere. Of course he hated the archaic language too. Nevermind that it was already archaic by the time the Wesleys got to writing in it (incidentally, the ever-beloved "Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown" includes the word "diedst").

He was also constantly telling me what "the people" would / wouldn't put up with or sing, without knowing my people.

The hymn to St. Joseph sang very well last night. It was written with my congregation in mind, and they don't balk at archaic language used consistently. Your mileage may vary, and if it won't work in your context, that's fine. It takes all kinds to make a world.

ServiamScores

For my part, apart from the sheer poetic beauty, I heavily value archaic / “King James English” for hymnody. It is my firm belief that such elevated language (or language that is at least one step removed from quotidian speech) is tantamount to a “poor man’s Latin”. Is almost an English equivalent to “Church Slavonic”. It signals that something special is happening here. It elevates us. Yes, it makes demands that plain language doesn’t, but it tends to reward in a way that plain language could only dream of.

(As is no surprise,) Sean, your hymn is lovely.

davido

Sean, can you comment on the history of the 9.8.9.8. meter? Very distinctive.

NihilNominis

@davido —

I wish I had something deep to say about this! “The Day Thou gavest, Lord, Is Ended” has always had an enticing meter (9.8.9.8) to me, and when the first lines came to me, they were to the same tune of that hymn, which I wasn’t upset about at all, so I went with it.

I was driving along thinking about the relationship between the silence of St. Joseph and the silence of our Lord during the passion (my reflections at the wheel are rarely so edifying as that), and much of the third stanza kind of came at once. Then I give it some thought and prayer and started drawing out other parallels, and thus the hymn. But since the first lines had been in this meter, I went with it.

I guess my thought was, we see Christ in all the saints. But here, in Joseph and Mary, we see two particular figures who actually were willed by God to help form the humanity of Christ. They are the saints of whom it can uniquely be said in some way that we see them in Christ, although he perfects their example.

Richard Mix

Another lovely 9898 tune is Du gabst, o Herr, mir Sein und Leben, the Offertory of Schubert's Deutsche Messe. Not such a good match for "The day thou gavest" though, as "ascended" falls on the striking descending octave.

CHGiffen

Except for being twice as long, RENDEZ À DIEU (98.98.D) is an outstanding hymn tune ("Father, we thank Thee Who hast planted"). It might be possible (with some accommodations or another stanza, such as a Doxology) to fit the current hymn text to this tune. It's actually how I sing through it now (I insert a repeat of the first stanza before the final stanza).

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