Safe home, safe home in port

Safe home, safe home in port. John Mason Neale* (1818-1866), based on a Greek text. This hymn, with the title ‘The Return Home’, was printed in Neale’s Hymns of the Eastern Church (1862) as ‘A Cento from the Canon of S. John Climacos’. It begins with a dramatic stanza: Safe home, safe home in port!  Rent cordage, shatter’d deck,Torn sails, provisions short,  And only not a wreck:But oh! the joy upon the shoreTo tell our voyage-perils o’er! Neale attributed it to St Joseph of the Studium, but the original Greek text has not been found, and this attribution seems to have been an error for St Joseph the Hymnographer (see JJ, p. 606). This is one of three hymns (cf. ‘O happy band of pilgrims’*...