Come down, O Love Divine  

The words of this hymn translate part of a long poem by Bianco da Siena (ca. 1350-1434).  Though born in a small town in Arezzo, Bianco worked as a wool carder in Siena immediately before becoming a lay brother; hence his name.  Bianco joined the newly founded brotherhood of the Gesuati, unordained men who renounced the world to live in apostolic poverty devoted to charitable work, especially paramedical work, and to preaching.  They had their name because of their custom of shouting “praise the name of Jesus” (Gesu) before and after preaching.  (The order degenerated later and was abolished in 1668 by Pope Clement IX; the order’s property devolved onto the Dominicans.)

 

Bianco wrote more than 120 religious poems, mostly laude, or praise poems; one is to his Sienese friend, St Catherine.  The poems were widely known but remained unpublished until 1851, when they were collected as Laudi Spirituali del Bianco da Siena, Povero Gesuato del Secolo XIV.  This poem is “Discendi, amor santo.”  It opens with a 4-line stanza, followed by 7 stanzas of 8 lines, rhyming ababbccd, where the d rhyme is always -anto, rhyming with “santo,” holy, the last word of the first line, and the last word of the poem.  The translation, by Richard Frederick Littledale (1837-1890), uses only parts of Bianco’s poem.  Littledale translates part of the opening quatrain, parts of stanzas 2-4 and parts of stanzas 7 and 8.  In total he uses about a third of the Italian poem (24 of 60 lines).  

 

Richard Littledale was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College there.  He graduated with a first in classics and later earned LL.B. and LL.D degrees from Trinity; he received a D.C.L. Degree from Oxford University, comitatis causa. Ordained in the Church of England in 1856, he served a brief curacy in Norfolk and a longer one in London (St. Mary the Virgin, Soho), but poor health caused him to leave parochial work.  He wrote steadily in his enforced retirement, publishing 43 books between 1857 and 1889.  Some of his work was scholarly, as his edition with John Mason Neale of early liturgies and his study of Religious Communities of Women in the Early Church.  Most, however, was related to controversies surrounding the Oxford Movement.  Littledale was himself a firm Tractarian, but he strongly opposed Anglo-Catholics becoming Roman Catholics.  

 

Littledale wrote many original hymns as well as translating hymns from Latin and Greek and from modern European languages.  “Come down, O love divine” is his best known; it first appeared in his The People’s Hymnal of 1862, but became well-known only when Ralph Vaughan Williams included it as a hymn for Pentecost in the English Hymnal in 1906.  Vaughan Williams composed the tune Down Ampney to fit  the unusual metre of Littledale’s translation (6 6 11 doubled).  He named the tune for the small Gloucester village where his father had been Rector of the Church of All Saints.