If we know John Newton’s name at all, it’s because he wrote “Amazing Grace,” which is, by all accounts, the most universally sung hymn in the English language. The conversion story bound up with that hymn is the one we’re most likely to remember: In 1744 the nineteen-year-old Newton (1725–1807) was press-ganged into service in the Royal Navy, but later traded to the master of a slave ship, which marked the beginning of his career in that sordid enterprise.

Through a series of misadventures at sea, coupled with his reading of Thomas à Kempis’s “The Imitation of Christ,” Newton began to apprehend his own helplessness and need for God’s saving grace. But it wasn’t until a stroke, suffered at the age of twenty-eight, prevented his return to maritime life, that he experienced the true sea-change of conversion. The taking-up of the abolitionist cause was a fruit of his newfound faith.

We’re familiar with “Amazing Grace,” written in 1772 and included in the “Olney Hymns,” the collection of Christian songs that Newton (by then an Anglican curate) compiled with his parishioner and friend, the poet William Cowper (whose own hymn, “Light Shining in Darkness,” appeared as yesterday’s Poem of the Day).

It’s not hard to see the appeal of “Amazing Grace”: its sincere personal piety, its honest confession of past difficulties, and the presence of God that has carried the speaker through those “dangers, toils, and snares.” Really, though, the greater part of its appeal is that it’s a hymn about conversion. Conversion, after all, is the great religious drama, the climax and turning point of a life. Everything else — so we may think — is just falling action and dénouement.

But this is a mistake: to think that conversion is the destination, that everything in a life tends toward that moment when light breaks forth and the heart is transformed. In fact, for those who take this kind of thing seriously, conversion is not the end of a road but the beginning. 

Where does such a road lead? If Newton’s “Amazing Grace” speaks of the end of the road before conversion, today’s Poem of the Day, Newton’s “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” speaks of the road afterward. Drawing on the language and imagery of Psalm 87 and Isaiah 33, this hymn gives us a Newton tuned to an entirely different key: no longer confessional, but prophetic, visionary, sublime.

The hymn’s eight-line stanzas, rhymed ababcdcd, break out of the standard hymn, or common, meter, with the fifth and sixth lines in tetrameter. Each of these stanzas praises the heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God, washed perpetually clean by its river of “living water,” its people perpetually fed by the God who has sustained them in the wilderness of life and brought them home. 

Today the hymn is most commonly sung to Haydn’s “Austria,” also the tune of the German national anthem, which caused, shall we say, some confusion in the 1930s and during the Second World War. Reportedly, during a 1936 visit to Durham Cathedral, the German Ambassador to England, Joachim von Ribbentrop, responded to the singing of this hymn with a Nazi salute and had to be restrained by the Marquess standing next to him.

During the war, amid complaints about the hymn’s tune, Cecil Vincent Taylor composed his setting, “Abbot’s Leigh,” still in wide use in Great Britain. “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken” survives, meanwhile, in shape-note songbooks, set to Alexander Johnson’s 1818 tune “Jefferson.”  In any of its various settings, though it assumes the distinctive character and voice of the music, Newton’s poem remains a blood-quickening experience of glory to come, for those who do not faint on the road. 

Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken
by John Newton

Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God.
He whose Word cannot be broken
formed thee for His own abode.
On the Rock of Ages founded,
what can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded,
thou may’st smile at all thy foes.

See, the streams of living waters,
springing from eternal love,
well supply thy sons and daughters
and all fear of want remove.
Who can faint while such a river
ever flows their thirst to assuage?
Grace, which like the Lord, the Giver,
never fails from age to age.

‘Round each habitation hov’ring,
see the cloud and fire appear
for a glory and a cov’ring,
showing that the Lord is near.
Thus deriving from their banner
light by night and shade by day,
safe they feed upon the manna
which He gives them on their way.

Savior, since of Zion’s city
I through grace a member am,
let the world deride or pity,
I will glory in Thy name.
Fading is the worldling’s pleasures,
all his boasted pomp and show;
solid joys and lasting treasures
none but Zion’s children know.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.