Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or since all music is but three parts vied
And multiplied;
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

from The Temple (1633) by George Herbert (1593-1633)

GEORGE HERBERT was himself a composer and keen musical performer, as well as a poet. For him, music is not just an aid to melancholy or source of comfort (“Sweetest of sweets” as he calls it in “Church-musick”), but a means by which we can be lifted up to God. “Rise heart,” the poet confidently exhorts his — and our — souls. The mood, captured so well in Vaughan Williams’s familiar setting, is joyful and uplifting, the command “Rise heart” echoing the triumphant first thanksgiving of the Easter Vigil and the Sursum Corda of the BCP communion service.

Taking us by the hand, the risen Christ pulls us up out of our sin that we might sing — if not literally with our mouths, then certainly in our hearts. The rousing act of singing, both literal and metaphorical, brings about transformation in our lives, “just” referring not only to our justification before God in Jesus Christ (through whose death on the cross, and through whose spirit, we are “calcined”, or purified, and made even better than gold), but also, in an intimate image, to a “just” note — one that is appropriate and perfectly in tune with God, thanks to what Jesus has done for us.

HERBERT then urges his lute to awake and take up a new Christian life of praise, which is also the challenging, self-denying way of life of the cross. On a lute, the strings were made of animal gut, stretched out taut (“taught”) over the “crosse” or bridge of the wooden frame of the instrument. Herbert makes an analogy between the fleshy strings and Christ’s body stretched out on the cross. This profound but startling image comes from Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms.

For Herbert, as for Augustine, the suffering of Christ on the cross — “his stretched sinews” — is the model for all music, which, in its physical vibrations in the hollow wooden frame of the instrument, has the capacity to express both suffering and hope. In prayer, we consciously adopt the position of God’s instrument, asking that, through the honesty of our song, our human suffering might be taken up into Christ’s and redeemed — even, in time, given meaning.

Through the feeble music of our prayer, Christ’s name is proclaimed with hope — “re-sounded” — in the worship of our own generation, lifting us up and reminding us that we are not alone in our struggles.

MUSIC, like the cross itself, as Simone Weil (a great reader of Herbert) writes in her Waiting for God, encompasses the extremes of human suffering as well as the hope of glory, the two notes on one level so opposed, and yet brings them together as one.

In Herbert’s time, sacred music was pitched a minor third higher than secular music. The high key was seen as appropriate for worship, especially on “this most high day”. Easter, the feast of all feasts, is the cause of rejoicing, when “heart and lute” come together to praise God and make music, as in a musical consort or group — tuned now, through the cross and resurrection, to a third member, God in Christ, in this musically heightened form of prayer.

Human sin has cut us off from God. We feel far from him, “untun’d, unstrung” as Herbert puts it elsewhere. Only God can mend this, restoring the fuller harmonies of heaven by the “blessed Spirit”, whose music repairs the broken consort of human disorder and transforms our groaning sounds and human efforts into something heavenly. This is the mystery of prayer, where the “three parts” of the triad or common chord that completes the harmony, interweaving and “vying” against each other to enrich and enliven the sound, are caught up into the pattern of the Trinity, and all dissonance is resolved.

For Herbert, music is not just relevant or relaxing, but essential: a precious gift of God, whose beauty inspires us and lifts our spirits up to God in worship. Without it, our prayer would be greatly impoverished.

Canon Anna Macham is Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral.