I HAVE been looking again at my old copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year, one of the books that inspired me to write my own Sounding the Seasons: Sonnets for the Christian year, the second half of whose title is, of course, a nod to Keble’s book.

I have a handsome Victorian edition in a blue leather binding with red and gold highlights, and, on the spine, four embossed and gilt stars of David interspersed between the title, and, towards the bottom of the spine, what must have been to those mid-Victorians one of the most exciting and cutting edge, hi-tech words: photographs!

The photographs, now faded, are mostly of Old Masters; but the one for the Epiphany shows three camels being ridden through a desert, which is, I think, a photograph of an actual scene, perhaps staged for the occasion. So, I glimpse, in its fading sepia tones, a moment as it actually was more than 150 years ago.

Keble is not so widely read now as he once was. Indeed, the same page as tells me that my edition is 1873 also says: Hundred and Fifty-Seventh Edition: with the author’s latest corrections and additions — a remarkable achievement for a book that was first published in 1827. In those days, Keble’s sales eclipsed those of Lord Byron.

I had taken the book down from my shelves to look up his poem for Trinity Sunday, since poetry rather than critical analysis seems the best way of approaching that mystery. Appropriately, the verse form that Keble chose to mark this day, as did George Herbert in his day, is a series of rhyming triplets. So, he opens with the lines:

Creator, Saviour, strengthening Guide,
Now on Thy mercy’s ocean wide
Far out of sight we seem to glide.

This might be another way of saying “When it comes to the Trinity, I am lost at sea”; but he goes on to do a little more than that, and the second triplet includes one of his better phrases:

Help us, each hour, with steadier eye
To search the deepening mystery,
The wonders of Thy sea and sky.

“To search the deepening mystery” would make a good watchword, or even mission statement, for poets and theologians alike.

Keble doesn’t leave us out at sea, but brings us, in the following verses, into “the Church’s central space”, and, specifically, to the choir, where we can “search the deepening mystery” of the Holy Trinity through the medium of music, which he does in the poem’s central triplet:

Three solemn parts together twine
In harmony’s mysterious line;
Three solemn aisles approach the shrine.

Keble is again channelling his inner George Herbert, whose observation that “all music is but three parts vied And multiplied” was used in his Easter poem before he invokes the Holy Spirit to help him worship. Herbert, though, does not make the musical triad a direct analogy to the Trinity, as Keble does here. Keble offers us this metaphor, and then shies away from it again; but it is rich with possibility.

I was lucky enough to be taught doctrine by Jeremy Begbie, the great contemporary theologian of music. I will never forget the way in which he offered the triad of a major chord, in which each note is distinct and yet blended and infused with the others, and the way in which we hear each of the three is enriched by our awareness of the other two, as a helpful way of thinking about Father, Son, and Spirit: distinct, yet interfused and interacting, mutually indwelling.

Malcolm Guite will be speaking at a one-day event, “Finding inspiration in the Psalms”, on 2 October. More information here.