All creatures of our God and King   

This hymn is a paraphrase of Il Cantico del Frate Sole (The Canticle of Brother Sun) by Giovanni di Bernardone, aka St Francis (1181-1226).  Despite his Christian name, Giovanni was called Francesco, or “Frenchy” by his father and is always known in English as Francis.  Brought up in relative wealth, as a young man Francis renounced worldly comfort to live in poverty and to serve the poor; others were soon attracted to join him as fratres minores, “lesser brothers,”  and soon they were officially recognized as a religious order.  An order of women, the Poor Clares, soon followed, led by Clare of Assisi.  In 1224, while fasting in preparation for Michaelmas, Francis had a vision during which he received the five wounds of Christ, the stigmata.  After this he retired to the small chapel near Assisi where he had begun his religious life.  He died there, aged 45.  It was during this last period that Francis wrote the Canticle, using his Umbrian dialect of Italian rather than the Latin which might have been expected.  Francis’ work, usually referred to as the first poem in Italian literature, is written in long, unrhymed lines; an introduction of 4 lines addresses the “most high, omnipotent” Lord.  The main body is 8 sentences of unequal length, each beginning, “Praised be, my Lord,” and the closing sentence alters that formula to “Praise and bless my Lord; thank him and be subject to him with great humility.”  I wonder if Francis’ poem may have been suggested by the “Song of the three Children” in the Book of Daniel, which gives us the Benedicite.

 

The English paraphrase that we sing is by William Draper (1855-1933), who wrote it for a children’s Whitsuntide celebration when he was Rector of the church of John the Baptist in Adel, Leeds.  Draper, educated in Cheltenham College and Keble College, Oxford, was appointed to Adel in 1899 and remained there until 1919, when he became Master of the Temple in London.  He wrote about 60 hymns and edited several hymnals.  While Francis’ poem praises God for all his creatures, Draper’s version has the creatures themselves praise God.  Draper omits Francis’ use of sibling words (brother sun, sister moon, etc.), but keeps a kind of intimacy by using the second person singular pronoun.  He converts Francis’ long lines into 5-line rhyming stanzas with a refrain, thus turning a litany into a hymn.  [A German translation of Draper’s hymn is in the modern German Protestant hymnal, Evangelisches Gesangbuch.]

Draper’s paraphrase was published in The Public School Hymn Book in 1919, set to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1906 arrangement of Lasst uns erfreuen, a tune first published as an Easter hymn in the (Counter-Reformation) Jesuit hymnal Ausserlesene Catholische Geistliche Kirchengesänge (Selected Catholic Spiritual Church Songs, Cologne, 1623) with the words Lasst uns erfreuen herzlich sehr (Let us rejoice most heartily).  Both tune and words are possibly by the 1623 editor, the Jesuit priest Friedrich Spee, but the opening musical phrase is older: it is the opening phrase of a setting for Psalm 119 in a Lutheran service book of 1525, but was later linked to Psalm 113 (and is sometimes called "Old 113th").  No copy of the 1623 volume now exists, but a 1625 publication contains the music and text.  The editors of The English Hymnal credit that 1625 volume as Vaughan Williams’ source, but recent research has suggested that he may have used a slightly later version.