Our Hymn of the Week comes from the pen of one of the most brilliant hymn writers in Christian history, Paul Gerhardt, and of course I’ve chosen one fit for this week’s theme, evening. Singing hymns appropriate for the various times of the day — the canonical hours — is a great way to redeem the time, to use Saint Paul’s wonderful phrase, by dedicating time itself to God, and not just the time of the day, but the time of one’s whole life that the progress of a day inevitably suggests. So there are plenty of evening hymns to choose from, and I’ve given the nod to this one, for two reasons. The first is the perfectly lovely and lilting melody, Innsbruck, adapted and harmonized by Bach, and otherwise known as Nun Ruhen Alle Wälder, that is, Now All the Woods are Still. The second is that I find the original poem to be unusually moving and even intimate, in a comforting and homely way, addressing the limbs and the faculties of the body as the poet lays him down to sleep.
Our English hymn is a paraphrase, so bear with me please as I give a prose translation:

Now all the woods are still; flocks, men, towns, and fields; the whole world sleeps. But you, my thoughts, time for you to get up and begin what will please your Creator.

Sun, where have you gone? The night has driven you out, night, the enemy of day. Go then; another sun, my Jesus, my delight, shines out bright in my heart.

The day is now past, and the little golden stars glitter in the vault of heaven. Just so shall I too stand, when my God calls me to leave this valley of misery.

The body hastens to its quiet rest, and lays aside clothing and shoes, image of mortality; I take them off, but Christ, in recompense, will dress me in his robe of honor and glory.

Head, hands, and feet are glad now that their labor is done; heart, you too rejoice, that from the sorrows of this earth and the travail of sin you shall be set free.

Now, you weary limbs, go and lay yourselves down, longing for bed; and a time and an hour will come when you will have a little bed prepared for your rest, in the earth.

My eyes are weary, and in a twinkling they are shut. Where then are the body and the soul? Take them to thy grace, be good to all who suffer, thou Eye and Watcher of Israel.

Spread thy wings, O Jesus, my joy, and take thy little chick into thy protection. And if Satan seeks to devour me, let the little angels sing, “This child shall be unharmed.”

And you too, my darlings, may no danger or mishap shall befall you tonight; may God set his band of angels with their golden weapons as a guard around your bed, that you may sleep in peace.

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Does Gerhardt paint with dark colors? Yes, but not only so, and in our day perhaps we need something other than the bold and the brazen. Yet I wouldn’t call his vision dark, not at all. It is one thing to color the world in gray, as so much of modern architecture does; another thing to show bright light in the midst of the deep blue and purple of nightfall. It is one thing to paint darkness unrelieved, and quite another to do as Tintoretto did in his Last Supper, to show light and color as all the more mysterious and glorious because of the darkness surrounding. And if anyone ever had justification to think of sadness and the transience of human life, it was Paul Gerhardt. As a child and a young man, he lived through the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, in east Germany, which suffered the worst of it. He married late in life, waiting till he could support a family, but four of his five children never made it to adulthood, and his dear wife died after a long illness. His life was sad, but he himself was not morose. And during the time in which he lived, both in Protestant and in Catholic lands, there was, in sacred art and music, a movement away from theological controversy and toward the piety of the individual soul. We can see it in the drama of the deeply Catholic Jean-Baptiste Racine, or in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, or Rembrandt’s series of paintings of the Prodigal Son, using himself as the model for the young man gone to that far country, or in the many devotionals of the time, for use in private prayer.

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Robert Bridges, a very good poet in his own right, whom we esteem mostly for his saving and publishing the brilliant poems of his late friend, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was also a shrewd translator. He preserves the meter of the original German, as he did in Ah, Holy Jesus, so that the hymn could be sung to the traditional German melody. He doesn’t much focus on those homely details of laying the body to sleep, as on the stars and the heavens above, and our hope in the life beyond life. Judge his paraphrase and adaptation on its own merits. I prefer Gerhardt, but the hymn we’ve got in English is excellent too.

The duteous day now closeth; each flower and tree reposeth, shade creeps o’er wild and wood; let us, as night is falling, on God our Maker calling, give thanks to Him, the Giver good. Now all the heavenly splendor breaks forth in starlight tender from myriad worlds unknown; and man, the marvel seeing, forgets his selfish being for joy of beauty not his own. His care he drowneth yonder, lost in the abyss of wonder; to heaven his soul doth steal; this life he disesteemeth, the day it is that dreameth, that doth from truth his vision seal. Awhile his mortal blindness may miss God’s lovingkindness, and grope in faithless strife; but when life’s day is over shall death’s fair night discover the fields of everlasting life.