The Missing Verses to St. Patrick’s Breastplate

“I bind unto myself” — the English translation of the ancient text known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate — is the recommended by Anglican practice to be sung (at least) twice a year..

One obviously is today, on St. Patrick’s Day, in honor of the missionary bishop who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 5th century. The other is on Trinity Sunday, because — as Patrick intended — it taught the doctrine of the Trinity in an understandable form, 15 centuries before Donall and Conall did.

I previously blogged on this 7 (actually 6½) verse hymn that most readers know from Hymnal (1940) or Hymnal 1982. Even with the switch of tune on verse six, it is a long hymn to sing.  As I wrote in 2019:

In my interviews on church music practice last fall, it was a (slightly) controversial hymn: everyone loved the doctrine and the memories it evokes. However, the parishioners were split: most loved the complete hymn, but a minority complained that it was too long. (IIRC only one music director regularly abridged the hymn).

Still, I have sung it many times — even a capella for all seven verses in a church retreat. It is probably my daughter’s favorite hymn at this point.

However, in January I learned about the missing verses of the hymn, that both complete the hymn and make it longer. I heard about it from a priest who has been a mentor to me and my father, Fr. Lawrence Bausch, who was (fittingly) rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal (later Anglican) Church in San Diego. In 2010 I wrote about their last worship service at their original home.

At a January 11 service at their new home, we sang all nine verses of the hymn. Fr. Bausch said he learned about the missing verses decades earlier, and argued that since then, he has always scheduled all nine verses, because the extra verses make the crucial theological points that were set up by the rest of the hymn.

About those Missing Verses

The Hymntime website lists the history of the 1889 poem by (Mrs.) Cecil F. Alexander:

Alexander penned these words at the request of Hercules Henry Dickinson, Dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle:

“I wrote to her suggesting that she should fill a gap in our Irish Church Hymnal by giving us a metrical version of St. Patrick’s Lorica, and I sent her a carefully collated copy of the best prose translations of it. Within a week she sent me that exquisitely beautiful as well as faithful version which appears in the appendix to our Church Hymnal.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged all nine verses to St. Patrick and Deidre for the 1906 The English Hymnal. Here are verse 5 (familiar to US Anglicans) and the missing verses 6 and 7:

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward;
The Word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave, the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.

Fr. Bausch said (paraphrasing) that while verses 1-5 talk about obedience to God and his power, without verse 6-7, it doesn’t say why. Clearly, many “modern” 20th century Christians don’t believe in demons, temptations, holy powers, Satan, wizards and the like. But this is their fault: the world remains enchanted by the eternal presence of the creator, whether we recognize it or not.

As a fully-modernized rationalist, I am struggling to overcome this delusion of disechantment. And nine verses is a lot of verses, even for the most diehard parish. Still, any church that uses St. Patrick’s Breastplate as a catechetical tool (rather than a cultural artefact) should pull out the extra verses once a year &emdash; preferably when thereis support from choir and organ.

Too much of a good thing

At a recent service, we sang “I bind unto myself this day,” (H40: 268) the traditional St. Patrick’s Day hymn. The Hymnal 1940 Companion helpfully notes:

[The hymn] is attributed by legend to St. Patrick [and] is first found in two eleventh century mss. ... Whether actually by St. Patrick or not, it has many element of a Druid incantation, superstitions of a sort which have long survived in Ireland and elsewhere.
...
The translation, or rather metrical paraphrase, was made by Cecil Frances Alexander for use on St. Patrick’s day in 1889. It was printed in leaflet form and sung throughout Ireland on that day. It first appeared in the [US] Hymnal in 1916.

The setting we use combines St. Patrick (or St. Patrick’s Breastplate) as the tune for most of the verses, and Deirdre for the penultimate verse — a combination created by Vaughan Williams for The English Hymnal (#212). H40 and H82 (#370) have the same seven verses, while the New English Hymnal (#359) moves verse 6 to a separate hymn (#278) with a different tune (Gartan).

I like this familiar hymn, but when we were singing the hymn, I must admit I got bored really quickly. Each verse (except #6) is long and slow, and there were six of them (plus the interlude). TEH would have been worse with nine verses.

Fortunately, both H40 and H82 indicate that verses 3, 4 and 5 — after the introduction of the melody and before the interlude — are optional. In most cases (outside Christmas or maybe Easter) I think five verses are enough, and in this case (IMHO) the music director should have omitted the extra verses. I’d especially take the cut in order to add other music (say a 2nd communion hymn) elsewhere in the service.

So with 3 or less verses, there is no need to mark optional verses, but otherwise — or with particularly long verses — they are merciful for both the singers and the congregation. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever serve on a hymnal committee.

Update: An unusual coincidence: this is the closing hymn of the first communion mass (Tuesday at noon) at next week’s International Catholic Congress of Anglicans. So nearly 300 of us will be singing all 7 verses.