On the rare occasions when, as a child, I attended services --
with friends or relatives, and usually Lutheran -- they sang (and eventually I
tried to sing with them), this simple song, a quatrain of tetrameters:
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
They called it “The Doxology”. It was sung to a tune which, I later learned, is known familiarly as “the Old One Hundredth”.
Simply
as written, it might almost be a quatrain from that other simple song
(though that one is stress-timed, the syllable-count being variable):
Praise the Lord for the humble woodchuck,
praise the Lord for the mouse and mole,
praise the Lord for the backyard visits
that sustain the soul.
praise the Lord for the mouse and mole,
praise the Lord for the backyard visits
that sustain the soul.
(That last line is a trimeter -- stress the “that”.)
But
there is a subtlety, a depth, a twist to the Doxology, as we actually
sang it. After the straightforward naturalness of the first verse, an
iambic tetrameter, the emphasis suddenly turns trochaic. The way we
sang it was:
PRAISE him ALL creaTURES here BE-low
The stress is now wrenchingly contrasemantic -- autonomous -- thrawn.
And
likewise for the third verse -- though here, additionally, we slipped
out of the familiar major key, to enter some mode more minor or indeed
medieval:
PRAISE him A-bove YE hea-ven-LY host
before finally returning to the sunny uplands of iambic rhythm and major key.
[Note: The technical term for such displaced stress metri causâ is "wrenched accent."]
~
For long, I did not know what this might mean.
Life
took an ever more secular course, and I did not hear the song again
until, in middle age, I at last was baptized, joining the Presbyterian
church in Princeton. There, we usually sang a sprightlier version,
with no sprung-rhythm, nor dark modes, and with some jolly “hallelujahs”
thrown in. But the old tones of the Old One Hundredth still dwelt in
memory.
The Doxology.
It was a numinous, a fearsome word, long and unEnglish and utterly
unused in the circles in which I usually moved, and yet as normal and
natural as “hot dog” or “baseball” to these believers. It concretized
the wall between the churched and the unchurched . Occasionally, when
staying with relatives, I would get a glimpse of what went on within
those walls: yet still it stood. between me without and them within.
And
even within the everyday American Protestant context itself, it had a
taste of strangeness. The business of that thrawn stress in the middle
verses always gnawed at me, and left me alert for such things. (I
later wrote a paper called “Contra-semantic Sentence Stress”, taking off
from the patter of stewardesses.) I never analyzed the thing, vaguely
assuming that, as does happen in verse, the choice of words was such as
momentarily to throw the beat off-kilter -- many poets do this deftly,
deliberately, just the right amount, to avoid any tedium or singsong
quality. But if you look at the verses as printed, you immediately see
that is not so. We could just as easily have sung them parallel to the
first verse:
Praise HIM all CREAT-tures HERE be-LOW-hoh…..
But
now here is the key -- and it is a key to Christianity as well, that
faith that embraces paradox -- and parasemantics. For, if we had sung
it straight through in that simple way, refraining from any blue notes
or celadon notes or burnt-umbrous notes as well, it truly would
have been like the Humble Woodchuck -- a children’s song. Nothing
wrong with that. A lot right with that. But genuine Christianity is
not by any means so simple. It states that flat out, at the outset,
with the startling, baffling, thrilling doctrine of the Trinity, which
sets all reductivizing simplification at defiance. And the doxology as
we sang it, in that southern-Californian church, our Fords and Buicks
shimmering out in the parking lot, to whisk us off afterwards for some
post-worship hamburgers -- as we sang it, it gave us a taste of
strangeness, a hint of darkness absent from our workaday American
lives, in that sunlit time before Kennedy was slain.
For see -- it does not bid just us to praise. All creatures. In particular and in primo: the ducks,
whose chorus of simple unstinting praise sails up to Heaven from every
field and pond. And even as we sing, our praise is paralleled, by a
higher choir, unseen but singing too, aloud and full-throated, upon
heights upon clouds upon Eternity and upon Time -- World Without End.
~ Praise Him ~
~
A story that will haunt your dreams
Also available for your Nook
~
[Appendix]
Other examples of effectively used contramorphological
ictus:
“Is she dreaming?” -- “Yes - I - thínk -
so.”
“Is she pretty?” -- “Yes - ev-ér - so.”
-- “Jennifer Juniper” (Donovan)
[Somehow, this last line wouldn't quite work with normal lexical stress.]
[Somehow, this last line wouldn't quite work with normal lexical stress.]
(And indeed the name itself, as pronounced in the refrain: Jennifér Junipér.
This seemingly
arbitrary ictus is redeemed in the final, French-language verse,
French being given to breath-group end-stress.)
French being given to breath-group end-stress.)
~
A further
prosodic wrinkle is that the
doxology is often performed while drawing out the final three or four syllables
of each line:
Praise God, from Whom all blesss - sings
- flooowww;
Praise Him, all creatures heere - beee - looowwww;
Praise Him above, ye Heaven - lyy - Hooost;
Praise Father, Son, and Ho - lyy - Ghooost.
Compare this
Proustian observation:
Le
marchand d’habits psalmodiait: « Habits, marchand d’habits, ha… bits », avec la même pause entre les deux dernières syllabes d’habits que s’il eût entonné en plain-chant: « Per omnia saecula saeculo… rum » …
--
Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (1919; p. 118 of the Pléiade
edition)
