Common Measure: the English Hymn

The Greek hymnos refers to a song of praise similar to the ode, and in the Christian tradition in the Middle Ages, these are predominantly in Latin. Vernacular hymns arise early in the Reformation and are given fixed form in English publications like the Book of Common Prayer (1548-59) and Thomas Sternhold= s Psalter (1556) or in America the Bay Psalm Book (1640). Hymnody flourished in the 18th C with notable hymnists such as Charles and John Wesley, Isaac Watts, William Cowper, John Newton, and in the 19th C with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Reginald Heber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Henry Newman. Poets both before and after these figures have replicated the structure for purposes varying from pious (Herbert) to highly ironic (Blake, Dickinson, Hardy, Eliot).

Common measure (or common meter) consists of quatrains of iambic lines, alternating tetrameter and trimeter, with a rhyme scheme of abcb or more tightly abab. If the subjects are not hymnic, this same form can be used for ballads. Hymn books indicate the form as 8686 or CM.

LM or long measure consists of quatrains entirely tetrameter (8888) with rhyme similar to CM. Short measure or SM reduces each line to trimeter (6666) except the third line which can remain tetrameter (6686).

Like the ballad, whose stanza is identical to CM, the congregational hymn has a certain corporate function that rises above the individual author or singer. As such it flourished in the late neoclassical period, subsuming the passions of the individual in the joint expression of the religious community. Comparisons can be made with the Psalms of ancient Israel.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from "Man Frail and God Eterna" (1719)

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.

(CM)

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), from "Because I could not stop for Death" (1863)

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

(CM)

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William Blake (1757-1827), from "London" (1794)

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

(LM)

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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), from "I Look into My Glass" (1898)

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"

(SM)

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