Heart & Voice - My Spirit Sang All Day

The Joy of Life (Bonheur de Vivre) by Henri Matisse, 1905

It was a great pleasure to introduce Heart and Voice on Wednesday 23rd October 2025 at 12.45pm at St Stephen Walbrook - thirty minutes of sublime choral music and readings sung by our talented Choral Scholars. My script is below. 

Finzi - My spirit sang all day (2.5m)

My spirit sang all day

O my joy.

Nothing my tongue could say,

Only My joy!

My heart an echo caught

O my joy

And spake, 

Tell me thy thought,

Hide not thy joy.

My eyes gan peer around,

O my joy

What beauty hast thou found?

Shew us thy joy.

My jealous ears grew whist;

O my joy

Music from heaven is't,

Sent for our joy?

She also came and heard;

O my joy,

What, said she, is this word?

What is thy joy?

And I replied,

O see, O my joy,

'Tis thee, I cried, 'tis thee:

Thou art my joy.

Hello and welcome to St Stephen Walbrook for this week’s ‘Heart and Voice’ - thirty minutes of sublime choral music sung by our fantastic Choral Scholars accompanied and directed this week by the talented Jonathan Dods. My name is Phillip Dawson, back making a guest appearance this week while Stephen Baxter is away. 

The theme for our music and readings today is the poetry of Robert Seymour Bridges, who was born on 23 October 1844 and was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. 

We’ve just heard Gerald Finzi’s setting of ‘My Spirit sang all day’ - a text published in 1890, shortly after Bridges ceased working as a physician due to ill health. Like much of his work, Bridges’ strong Christian faith shines through. The musical setting was composed whilst Finzi was courting the woman who would become his wife, who happened to be called Joy:

 

My spirit sang all day
O my joy.
Nothing my tongue could say, 
Only my joy!

Next we hear another of Bridges’ short texts, published at the same time and set to music by Herbert Howells. 

Howells - My eyes for beauty pine (2.5m)

My eyes for beauty pine, 

My soul for Goddes grace : 

No other care nor hope is mine, 

To heaven I turn my face. 

One splendour thence is shed 

From all the stars above : 

'Tis named when God's name is said, 

'Tis Love, 'tis heavenly Love. 

And every gentle heart, 

That burns with true desire, 

Is lit from eyes that mirror part 

Of that celestial fire. 

A change of tone in our next poem, which draws together elements of Bridges training as a physician, his faith and his love of nature. ‘Low Barometer’ suggests that a drop in air pressure affects our emotions - highlighting our interconnectedness with the natural world; contrasting the blustery storms outside with emotional unease within.  

Bridges’ text seems to put into words what many experience at this time of year, as the seasons change and nights draw in, in the run up to All Hallows Eve and All Souls Day.

Poem - Low Barometer by Robert Bridges

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.

Begun in 1924 and completed in 1929 when he was eighty five, The Testament of Beauty is Bridges’ last will and testament in the form of a long philosophical and reflective poem in which he looks back on his life and work. During the First World War Bridges’ output slowed. He wrote: 

"Just at present I am far too disturbed to write, the communication with my subconscious mind is broken off."

In ‘The Testament of Beauty’, Bridges praises the work of artists such as Bach and Mozart who were able to continue to compose while Europe was at war in their own time. 

Let’s remind ourselves of one of those works now as the choir sing Jesu joy of man’s desiring. 

Bach - Jesu joy of man's desiring (3.5m)

Jesu joy of man's desiring

Holy wisdom, love most bright

Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring

Soar to uncreated light

Word of God, our flesh that fashioned

With the fire of life impassioned

Striving still to truth unknown

Soaring, dying round Thy throne

Through the way where hope is guiding

Hark, what peaceful music rings

Where the flock in Thee confiding

Drink of joy from deathless springs

Theirs is beauty's fairest pleasure

Theirs is wisdom's holiest treasure

Thou dost ever lead Thine own

In the love of joys unknown

A classical scholar, Bridges’ To Catullus is his homage not to his favourite puss - but to the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, whose emotional directness and technical prowess inspired generations of writers. 

Bridges was a founding member of the Society of Pure English which sought to promote clarity, beauty and intelligibility in language. He proposed phoenetic simplification to aid spelling and understanding amongst all. 

In To Catallus, Bridges seeks to echo the form and meter of Latin poetry while preserving the natural rhythm of English. 

Poem - To Cattalus by Robert Bridges 

Would that you were alive today, Catullus! 

Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us, 

A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk, 

Of no least sorry use on earth, but only 

Fit in fancy to justify the outlay 

Of your most horrible vocabulary. 

My Muse, all innocent as Eve in Eden, 

Would yet wear any skins of old pollution 

Rather than celebrate the name detested. 

Ev’n now might he rejoice at our attention, 

Guess'd he this little ode were aiming at him. 

O! were you but alive again, Catullus! 

For see, not one among the bards of our time 

With their flimsy tackle was out to strike him; 

Not those two pretty Laureates of England, 

Not Alfred Tennyson nor Alfred Austin.

In our next text we return once again to Bridge’s fascination with the beauty of God’s creation. With echoes of the Song of Songs, Christ hath a garden draws on the rich metataphor of the garden as a sacred space - the setting for one of the creation stories in Genesis and Christ’s first post resurrection appearance. 

In this poem Christ tends his garden - his church and his people, nurturing them with grace and love, wafting his divine fragrance abroad.

The poem is set to music by the contemporary American composer Howard Helvey. 

Howard Helvey - Christ hath a garden (4.5m)

Christ hath a garden walled around,

A Paradise of fruitful ground,

Chosen by love and fenced by grace

From out the world's wide wilderness.

Like trees of spice His servants stand,

There planted by His mighty hand;

By Eden's gracious streams, that flow

To feed their beauty where they grow.

Awake, O wind of heaven, and bear

Their sweetest perfume through the air;

Stir up, O south, the boughs that bloom,

Till the beloved Master come;

That He may come and linger yet

Among the trees that He hath set;

That He may evermore be seen

To walk amid the springing green.

In The Testament of Beauty, Bridges wrote:

“What is Beauty? saith my sufferings then.—I answer

the lover and poet in my loose alexandrines:

Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences,

the quality of appearances that thru’ the sense

wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man:

And Art, as it createth new forms of beauty,

awakeneth new ideas that advance the spirit

in the life of Reason to the wisdom of God.”

Bridges valued the beauty of the natural world not just for its own sake - but understood the appreciation of it to be a way of drawing ourselves closer to God. Our next piece seeks to sum up this philosophy. 

I love all beauteous things was

commissioned from Judith Weir by St

Paul’s Cathedral to mark the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II in 2016. 

Judith Weir - I love all beauteous things (3.5m)

I love all beauteous things, 

I seek and adore them; 

God hath no better praise, 

And man in his hasty days 

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make

And joy in the making! 

Altho' tomorrow it seem' 

Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered, on waking. 

Thank you for joining us for Heart and Voice. Next week the choir explore the text of the Beatitudes in music and poetry. Join them again at 12.45pm on Wednesday. Our music ministry here at St Stephen Walbrook is funded entirely by donations from generous people like you. Please do tap your card or put some cash in the slot at the back on your way out if you can.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer described each time we meet another person as an “occasion for joy.” What a great joy it has been to meet all of you today for a moment of stillness. For our final piece, the choir send us back out to the bustling Square Mile with the words of Robert Bridges set once again to music by Gerald Finzi. 

‘Haste on, my joys! your treasure lies

In swift, unceasing flight.’

So friends, before you prepare to ascend on the wings of more glorious music, on behalf Jonathan, the choral scholars and all of us at St Stephen Walbrook, let me wish you a glorious week ahead & we hope to see you again soon.

Gerald Finzi - Haste on, my joys! (2m)

Haste on, my joys! your treasure lies

In swift, unceasing flight.

O haste: for while your beauty flies

I seize your full delight.

Lo! I have seen the scented flower,

Whose tender stems I cull,

For her brief date and meted hour

Appear more beautiful.

O youth, O strength, O most divine

For that so short ye prove;

Were but your rare gifts longer mine,

Ye scarce would win my love.

Nay, life itself the heart would spurn,

Did once the days restore

The days, that once enjoyed return,
Return, ah! nevermore. 

Image : The Joy of Life (Bonheur de Vivre) by Henri Matisse, 1905