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O worship the King, all glorious above, O gratefully sing his power and his love— Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days, Pavilion’d in splendor and girded with praise. | |
O tell of his might, O sing of his grace, Whose robe is the light— whose canopy space. His chariots of wrath deep thunder-clouds form, And dark is his path on the wings of the storm. | |
The earth, with its store of wonders untold, Almighty! thy power hath founded of old; Hath stablish’d it fast by a changeless decree, And round it hath cast, like a mantle, the sea. | |
Thy bountiful care what tongue can recite? It breathes in the air, it shines in the light: It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain, And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain. | |
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail: Thy mercies how tender! how firm to the end! Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer and Friend! | |
O measureless might! Ineffable Love! While angels delight to hymn thee above, The humbler creation, tho’ feeble their lays, With true adoration shall lisp to thy praise! |
This is the poem by Sir Robert Grant known best from its incipit “O Worship the King,” as published posthumously under the title “Psalm ⅭⅣ” by his brother Charles Grant (Lord Glenelg) in Sacred Poems by the Late Right Hon. Sir Robert Grant (1839), pp. 33-35. It was first published without attribution as hymn №31 in the Appendix of Hymns for private devotion, selected and original (ed. Bethia Fuller-Maitland, 1827) on pages 206-207. It was first published with attribution as psalm №104 in Psalms and Hymns for Public, Private, and Social Worship (ed. Henry V. Elliott, 1835) on pages 34-35. Identified as an adaptation of Psalms 104 (and with five of its six stanzas) the hymn was included as №16 in the Union hymnal for Jewish worship (1914). Brian Hehn writes, “This hymn, one of Grant’s most popular, is a paraphrase of Psalm 104. It was originally thought to have been a rendering of William Kethe’s setting of the same psalm in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561. However, Episcopal hymnologist Raymond F. Glover contends that this is a misconception. He argues that the two settings are in the same meter only because they were written for the same psalm.”
Source(s)
“O worship the King, all glorious above! — an adaptation in English verse of Psalms 104 by Sir Robert Grant (1827)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project under the Creative Commons Zero (CC 0) Universal license a Public Domain dedication.
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