Rhyme and rhythm for the glory of God

I had a thought this morning in chapel. It is not a new thought. We were doing praise songs. Don't get me wrong; I like praise songs, in principle, and there are a few good ones. I also don't want to criticize our song leader this morning, because he did an entirely adequate job, and I'm grateful to him.

Nevertheless, the lyrics we sang today, and many lyrics we sing often, are not good. On a purely literary and technical level, they are sub-par. They possess neither rhyme nor rhythm. They do not draw one's attention to what one is singing. They have no brilliant moments of insight, no skillfully-drawn-out metaphors to make anything become realer or truer to the singer. They feel incompetent. They may or may not be amateur, but they certainly look it.

It is the nature of a song--or indeed any poetry--to be brief (relative to an epic or a novel). It must choose one thing to say and say it as effectively as ever it may. You get this in short story theory: you don't have many words to work with, so every word needs to be doing its duty well and twice and thrice over, doing more than one thing, never ever ever there just as filler. Dr. Hake calls poetry "language at its densest."

You can choose to write a poem in meter or not, as you like, but a poet should be aware that the decision has meaning. (This is like the "intolerable compliment" Lewis speaks of: God has decreed that the decisions human make actually matter eternally.) Critics notice the form of a poem. Syllables halting along in irregular ways reflect the chaos and meaninglessness of the universe. A regular meter with nicely rounded-off phrases tends to reflect a coherent, comprehensible, beautiful universe. One could, conceivably, write a praise song in which form and substance are unified--as in, rough rhythm and mourning over one's sin--but when there is no conceivable design behind word choice--when it is apparently just what the author thought of first, and didn't have the time or skill to refine into anything more meaningful--when one analyzes something according to the rules of its trade and it is found wanting--then a Christian can mourn.

Meter and rhyme schemes help a song, they really do, because then even if the words are a bit uninspired, one can analyze the form and gain edification that way. When the words are, basically, "I love You/ Forever and ever/ You are good and great," --well, this is true, one hopes, but it's really boring.

Also, it occurs to me that when a stanza is repeated, oh, six times in the course of a song, if the words were worth listening to and repeating, that would be better. The unbelievers can do it; even nihilists can craft a piece so that it is a joy to hear and know and memorize. Word choice matters. Mark Twain mocked James Fenimore Cooper for using "a word's second cousin" instead of the word itself. The right word actually emphasizes the point an author is trying to get across. The mostly-right word fogs things.

This comes back to a Christian view of work, I think. It's not just what job is done, but how well one does it. Incompetence depresses. God is pleased for the foolish to shame the wise, but He also demanded skilled workmen to build His temple. Glorify God, people! We wouldn't like a Christian plumber who couldn't keep a pipe from leaking! We wouldn't like a Christian jeweler whose necklaces didn't clasp properly! Just the same, it's annoying to sing songs written by poets who can't tell an iamb from a dactyl, or if they can tell, don't care.

It's really not that complicated, but it does take work. Future lyricists, take note!