‘Hymnus’ Anonymous (16th century)

*The Annunciation from a ‘Book of Hours’ (1514): illustration by Jean Bourdichon*

God be in my hede                        
And in my understanding,  
God be in myne eyes 
And in my loking,                
God be in my mouth      5
And in my speaking,
God be in my harte
And in my thynkyng,
God be at my ende,
And at my departing.   10

NOTE: ‘hede’ (1) = head; ‘myne’ (2) = my;’ ‘loking’ (4) = looking; ‘harte’ (7) = heart; ‘thynkyng’ (8) = thinking; ‘ende’ (9) = end.

Considering the Poem

This devotional verse was included under the title here (the Latin for ‘hymn’) in ‘The Penguin Book of Religious Verse’ edited by the Welsh priest and poet, R. S. Thomas, in 1963. It is fairly well-known and is certainly memorable and easy enough to memorise because of its incantatory manner and also, perhaps, for the simple reason that the author’s method is to work his or her way down the human body from head to eyes to mouth to heart in order not just to make the ideas follow logically but to show that the aim of the prayer is to invite God’s presence in the whole of our person as we speak or recite these lines and as a companion during the last moments of fear, hope and helplessness.

Different sources of information give slightly different accounts of the prayer’s origins and history. It apparently appeared in the The Sarum Rite (or, the Use of Salisbury), a text which was developed by St Osmund, a Bishop of Salisbury, just after the Norman conquest and used for public worship up until the Reformation. It was eventually abolished by Queen Elizabeth in 1559. Elements of the Sarum Rite, however, were revived in Anglo-Catholic worship in Victorian times.

In Mark’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus taught: “There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile a man” (Mark 7, 15). Perhaps the writer had this passage in mind: he or she too writes with the assumption that the source of defilement is inside us and so the prayer concentrates on the speaker’s states of mind, feeling, perception and expression and hopes for God’s purifying presence in those states of feeling and mind.

We are used to separating things to do with the mind and understanding from things to do with feeling and the heart so the link between the heart and thinking (7-8) may seem to us a bit odd. Still, the bible doesn’t always seem to dissociate thought from feeling. In John 12, 40 (King James version) we are told that, because their hearts had been hardened, some people were unable to believe in Jesus: they could “nor understand with their heart”.

Of the poem’s forty-five words, thirty-five are repeated, up to eight times in some cases. Only ten words appear only once in the verse. The intensity of repetition and the relentless simplicity of the language are what give the poem its sharpness, force, and definition. All the words in the poem would surely be understood by a young child but the complex network of concepts and feelings that emerges from the piece as a whole most certainly would not.