Harvest Festival hymns

19 August 2019

Harvest hymns and songs - and the stories behind them:

 

Wir pflügen, und wir streuen   Matthias Claudius (1740-1815).

It is a robust hymn, full of homely and pious simplicity. Its importance in German culture (at least in the 19th century) is shown by a lovely scene in a short story by the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’... Gaskell’s story was published in 1862, a year after Jane Montgomery Campbell had published her translation, We plough the fields and scatter, which has carried the German harvest hymn to the whole of the English-speaking world...

 

Come, ye thankful people, come    Henry Alford (1810-1871).

The hymn was written when Alford was vicar of Wymeswold, a small village near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, where the rural economy was centred on the harvest. It skilfully uses the traditional cry of ‘Harvest Home!’ in three of the four verses, bringing it from the fields into the parish church, so that the hymn gives a very real sense of a community thanksgiving...

 

All things bright and beautiful   Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-1895).

The full text is seldom printed, because it contains what Percy Dearmer called ‘the appalling verse’ (the original verse 2). It seems likely that the author was trying to be inclusive, and reflecting the Irish society that she knew: but the result is a verse which can be interpreted as suggesting that God is responsible for inequality in the economic and social system...

 

For the fruits of his creation   Fred Pratt Green (1903-2000). 

It moves from the physical signs of husbandry, the ploughing, sowing, and reaping, to the harvests of the spirit. The penultimate line of this hymn (‘Most of all, that love has found us’) was described by Erik Routley as ‘that which may be the greatest single moment in even Fred's hymns so far’...

 

See also: Countryside, hymns