Father, hear the prayer we offer

This hymn, written by Love Maria Willis (née Whitcomb; 1824-1908) in six 4-line stanzas, first appeared in John S. Adams’ Psalms of Life, 1857.  Willis entitled it “Aspiration.” She later (1859) published it in Tiffany’s Monthly Magazine, of which she was an editor.  Love Maria came from a long line of Unitarian ministers in New Hampshire.  She worked in Boston and New York. In 1858 she married Frederick Llewellyn Willis, who had been expelled from Harvard Divinity School because of his involvement with Spiritualism.  Frederick Willis became a doctor, but he continued to preach and write on Spiritualism, and his wife wrote for and edited several prominent Spiritualist journals, including the Boston-based The Banner of Light, a journal devoted largely to reports of contact with the dead.   A text of the hymn altered by Samuel Longfellow was printed in his A Book of Hymns and Tunes, 1860, and later in Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, Hymns of the Spirit, 1864.  It is the altered form, reduced to four stanzas, that has become the hymn printed in modern hymn books.  Willis wrote the hymn in the first-person singular; it was Adams who changed it to first-person plural.

 

The tune for Willis’ hymn printed by Longfellow has not lasted.  Modern hymnals use a variety of other tunes, including J.B. Dykes’ “St Sylvester” and Martin Shaw’s “Marching.”  We sing Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Sussex.” Vaughan Williams collected several versions of the tune he turned into the hymn tune, all sung to a narrative about the sinking of a ship of the line, The Royal George, in Portsmouth Harbour in 1782.  On a collecting trip in 1904 VW heard the folk tune sung by Paul Verrall; he composed the hymn tune when he and Percy Dearmer were preparing The English Hymnal in 1906