Pantycelyn and Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah

A nation that has been forbidden its own pulpit will, in the end, learn to carry its faith in its mouth. Not in books, which can be seized; not in buildings, which can be locked; but in lines short enough for a shepherd to memorise on the third repetition, set to a metre the lungs already know. The hinge of a people's spiritual life is sometimes turned not by a bishop or a king but by a country curate at a farmhouse desk, deciding what shape a prayer must take if it is to be sung by men and women who cannot read.

THE FARMHOUSE AT PANTYCELYN

William Williams was born at Cefn-coed in the parish of Llanfair-ar-y-bryn on the eleventh of February 1717, son of John Williams the yeoman farmer and Dorothy of Llandysul. He read at the dissenting academy at Llwyn-llwyd near Hay-on-Wye, intending the physician's trade, and came down in 1737 with a Latin tag in his pocket and no settled call. The call found him at Talgarth churchyard in 1738, where Howell Harris was preaching in the open air to a crowd the parish church could not hold. He took deacon's orders in the Church of England in 1740 and served curacies at Llanwrtyd and Abergwesyn. In 1742 the bishop refused him priest's orders: he would not subscribe in the terms required, and the Methodist revival had set his loyalties past mending with the establishment. The same year, his father died, and the farm at Pantycelyn in northern Carmarthenshire passed to him. From the upstairs room of that farmhouse, two miles north of Llandovery, he rode the Welsh Methodist circuit for the next half-century, an itinerant under the Calvinistic Association of Harris and Daniel Rowland, three thousand miles a year on horseback through Cardiganshire, Pembrokeshire, Brecon, and Glamorgan. He preached, but more often he sang. The Welsh chapels had no organs, no printed books, no trained choirs. They had voices, and a hunger.

LATE AFTERNOON, MAY OR JUNE 1762

It is twenty past five in the long evening light of the Welsh upland country in early summer. The casement above the desk faces west, over the home pasture down to the Bran. He is forty-five years old. On the boards beneath the window the dust lies in a strip of sun. The collection is to go to Daniel David, the printer at Carmarthen, by the end of the week, carried down by John Thomas of the circuit. Three verses are wanted; he has the first two clean, in his fine clerk's hand, and the third is not yet on the paper. The metre is the octosyllabic line the Welsh ear has carried since the cywyddwyr, four stresses, the cadence of walking. The theme is set: the wilderness of Exodus, the pilgrim, the manna, the cloven rock, the Jordan. He has preached on Exodus seventeen times this spring. The miners at Hirwaun, the lead-men at Cwmsymlog, the drovers coming down off the Epynt have all heard him on the rock that Moses struck, and on the water that came out of it.

THE THIRD VERSE

The pen rests. The question is not what to say; the question is what the colliers at Hirwaun can remember walking home in the dark. A hymn is no use if it cannot be carried out of the chapel without a book. Each verse must end where the lung ends; each line must fall on a stress the foot would take on a hill road. Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch. Lord, lead me through the wilderness. The line is plain; a child learns it on the second repetition, a tired man on the third. The wilderness is the fallen world, the pilgrim is the chapel-member, the aid is the only aid there is. He hears, through the open casement, the bleat of the ewes on the slope above the house, and the iron of a horseshoe on the cobbles in the yard, John Williams the eldest leading the cob in from the lane. The verse forms under the pen: he asks for the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day, for the manna and the crystal fountain, for the strong deliverer to be his strength and shield, for the Jordan to be set aside. There is a temptation, he knows it well, to write for the learned, for the men with Latin and bookshelves. He does not write for them. He writes for the woman at the loom in Cynwyl Elfed who has never opened a printed book and never will. He writes for the boy driving cattle to Smithfield who must have something in his head for the long road. The metre takes the burden the page cannot take. A printed hymnal can be confiscated; a tune in the mouth cannot. He sets down the closing line and reads the three verses through, once, half aloud, the way a singer would take them on a Sunday, and the room settles round the cadence. It is done. He blots the sheet. The bell on the byre rings for the evening milking.

TO THE PRINTER AT CARMARTHEN

The manuscript goes down by John Thomas on the Tuesday. Daniel David sets it in the autumn, in the small octavo collection Caniadau, y rhai sydd ar y môr o wydr, Songs which are upon the sea of glass, Carmarthen 1762, the fourth of the twelve Welsh hymn-books he will publish in his life. The print run is small; the circuit-riders carry the copies in their saddlebags from chapel to chapel, and where one copy lands fifty voices learn the lines by ear. By the next sasiwn of the Calvinistic Association at Llangeitho the new hymn is in the mouths of the congregation before the printed sheet has reached half the circuit. This is the way a Welsh hymn travels in 1762: not from the press outward but from the mouth onward.

THE INTERLUDE OF PETER WILLIAMS

Nine years on, at Water Street in Carmarthen, another Williams, Peter, sometime curate, ejected from his living in 1762 for the same Methodism, is at his own desk with the Welsh sheet before him and a quill. He is making the English version for the chapels of the diaspora, for the Welsh in London and the slate-quarrymen who have crossed into Lancashire. He keeps the wilderness; he changes the address. Arglwydd becomes Jehovah: Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land. The hymn-writer of Pantycelyn will see the translation and tighten it the following year with his son John, but Peter's first line will stand. The English-language version goes out from Carmarthen in 1771 and within a generation is sung from Pennsylvania to New South Wales. The man who first lined it has not moved from his farm.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

William Williams Pantycelyn rode the circuit until illness held him back in his last decade. He died at the farmhouse on the eleventh of January 1791, in his seventy-fourth year, and was buried in the churchyard at Llanfair-ar-y-bryn under a stone that names him Pencerdd Pantycelyn, the chief poet of Pantycelyn. The Hopcyn-Jones bibliography of 1924 counts nine hundred Welsh hymns and a hundred and twenty English from his pen, the foundational lyrical body of Welsh Nonconformist singing. Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch outran them all. In 1907, a hundred and forty-five years after the Carmarthen printing, John Hughes of Pontypridd wrote the tune Cwm Rhondda for the centenary of the chapel of that name; the marriage of the 1762 Welsh text and the 1907 Welsh tune became the congregational hymn of the modern chapel and of the diaspora, sung in seventy-five languages by the count of the recent hymnological surveys. It is the hymn the Cardiff crowd of seventy-five thousand carries by heart in Welsh before a rugby international, three verses without a printed sheet, the manna and the crystal fountain and the strong deliverer set against the open roof of the Principality Stadium. It was the recessional at the wedding at St Paul's on the twenty-ninth of July 1981, by the request of the bride.

RETURN

The line that travels furthest is the line the unlettered can carry. Pantycelyn understood, that summer afternoon over the Bran, that a faith proscribed from the pulpit will live in the lungs of those who walk home in the dark; that a verse short enough to learn on the third repetition will outlast any book that can be taken off a shelf. The upstairs room at the farmhouse is preserved as a small private museum on the Llandovery road, and since 1991 a bronze plaque on the wall above the desk reads, in Welsh, Yma yr ysgrifennodd William Williams Pantycelyn 'Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch' yn 1762.