To Sleep, and an Evening Hymn
Sep 18th, 2008 by oldfogey
The moment in this series on Sleep where sleep becomes the metaphor for death. This is nowhere explicit in the song itself, Henry Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’. The references are to the sun, its decaying light, and the soft bed whereon ‘my body I dispose’, and the offer of myself to the arms of God for His safekeeping in ’sweet security’. It is prayer. ‘Then to my rest. O my soul’.
Yet this is one of those heart-aching pieces that often is played at funerals, as if by some natural recognition that in all its words and its final offering of the soul to God at the end of the day it becomes a song of eternal rest and a plea for His perpetual light now, more than the sun, to shine upon us for ever more.
The singer is Emma Kirkby. I have heard this sung many times and no-one matches her.
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