Forty days and forty nights   

George Hunt Smyttan (ca. 1822-1870) first published this text as a poem of nine stanzas in the Penny Post, a Tractarian publication aimed at working class readers (March 1856).  It was entitled "Poetry for Lent; As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing."  Smyttan was born in India, where his father was a member of the medical board for the Bombay district. The family returned to Scotland in 1839 and Smyttan entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (B.A. 1845).  Ordained to the diaconate in 1848 and to the priesthood in 1849, he became Rector of Hawkesworth in Nottinghamshire in 1850.   He married Frances Hardy Grey in June, 1848, but they seem to have lived apart.  Smyttan  remained at Hawkesworth until 1859, when he abruptly resigned for unknown reasons.  He preached in various places after that but was not again permanently attached to a parish.  Smyttan published three volumes of verse: Thoughts in Verse for the Afflicted, 1849; Florum Sacra, 1854; and Mission Songs and Ballads, 1860.  He died while travelling in Germany in 1870, where no one knew him or knew anything about any relatives; he was therefore buried in a paupers’ cemetery in Frankfurt, noted only as “Smyttan, England.”  

 

The six-stanza hymn we sing is adapted from Smyttan’s longer poem by Francis Pott (1832-1909), omitting stanzas 3, 4 and 7, and slightly altering the wording of those stanzas he kept.   Born in Southwark, London, where his family had a vinegar factory, Pott may have been educated privately as a youth; he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1850, studying classical languages (B.A. 1854). While there he came under the influence of Edward Bouverie Pusey, the Regius Professor of Hebrew and a leader of the Oxford Movement.  Pott was ordained to the priesthood in 1856 and served in several curacies before being appointed Rector of a village in Bedfordshire in 1866.  Severe deafness forced him to resign his priestly duties in 1891.  Pott wrote a number of hymns that remain in wide use, including “Angel voices ever singing” and “The strife is o’er the battle done.”  He was briefly a member of the group which created the first edition of A&M (1861).  His adaptation of Smyttan’s poem was first published there.  But Pott produced his own hymn book, Hymns Fitted to the Order of Common Prayer, which also appeared in 1861.  Henry Baker, the primary force behind A&M, believed that Pott had acted illegally, and certainly ungentlemanly, with regard to hymns that appeared in both A&M and Pott’s Hymns Fitted.

 

The tune, Aus der tiefe, first appeared in the Nürnbergisches Gesang-Buch (1676-77) setting a text by Christoph Schwamlein  based on Psalm 130, Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, “Out of the deep I cry.”  The melody is attributed there to “M.H.,” presumably Martin Herbst (1564-81), a Lutheran teacher and theologian.  But in some early English-language hymn books the name “Heinlein” was attached to the tune due to a misattribution to the later composer Paul Heinlein (1626-1686); that mistake is still occasionally perpetrated.  The harmonization in A&M is by William H. Monk (1823-1889), who was organist and choirmaster of King’s College, London, and the musical editor of A&M.