2 April 2020
Another #Throwback Thursday for #homeworship from Guildford Cathedral today!
A wonderful moment of recalling when both boy and girl choristers sang together, with our fabulous lay clerks, on a tour to Spain a few years ago.
Here's another example of using poetry to pray - an incomparable text by Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (full text below). This video is an excerpt of a setting of this text by sometime music tutor to H M Queen Elizabeth II, William Henry Harris: Faire is the heaven.
Faire is the heaven, where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie,
Whence they doe still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine Eternall Majestie;
Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins,
Which all with golden wings are overdight,
And those eternall burning Seraphins,
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;
Yet fairer than they both, and much more bright,
Be th' Angels and Archangels, which attend
On God's owne Person, without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling,
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is the Highest farre beyond all telling,
Fairer than all the rest which there appear,
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortall tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?