A PROSE LYRIC

Today is the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity by the old and proper Anglican reckoning. It is especial only to those who still, after 468 years, love Thomas Cranmer, not particularly for his personality nor even for his doctrine, but for his unusual literary genius – a talent that showed itself nowhere in his ordinary prose but only in his translations of Latin liturgical texts. These, as a hundred generations knew by birthright but new generations are only slowly rediscovering, are little short of miraculous; and today’s Collect is perhaps the most perfect of them all.

Here is the original version, from the 8^th-century Gelasian Sacramentary:

Largire, quaesumus Domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placátus, et pácem: ut pariter ab omnibus mundentur offensis, et secura tibi ménte desérviant.
Per Dominum... 

What Cranmer found there was a text moving in its meaning: it asks God to give to his faithful the gifts of forgiveness and peace, so that they may equally be shriven of all their offences and serve him in security of spirit. Moreover, the Latin has some elegance in its word-order, and the endings of the two clauses are so ordered that they show the characteristic rhythmic end-patterns known as cursus, in this case a cursus planus (/xx/x) and a cursus velox (/xx/xx) respectively.

The challenge for the translator lay in the form’s compact and condensed beauty. How to render this in English? Cranmer had an ear for the cursus, which has distant relatives in native English prose rhythms, and the collect’s first one suggested to him the use of the very English feature of alliteration. Moreover, he realised that the Latin was so constructed that each of the second clause’s two halves expanded on a term of the first clause, the first on indulgentiam and the second on pacem: this he could also do in his translation. We do not know how many attempts he made, but when he had finished the Collect for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity looked like this:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

However, the beauty of the form and the ordering of the content is better seen if we print it like this:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace:

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind.

Note how Cranmer begins with a cursus planus, but placed at the beginning of sentence, which Latin never did; and he continues with three other two-stress phrases, the second and fourth ending on a stressed syllable, to give an almost metric stanza (or two Anglo-Saxon half-lines). Then he broadens the pattern to end with two three-stress lines, which expand on “pardon” and “peace” respectively.

It is a jewel of a Collect, as exquisitely patterned as an Elizabethan sonnet. For those not used to examining Cranmer’s Collects in this way, it provides a splendid introduction: almost all of these prayers in the Book of Common Prayer have remarkable qualities of content or form, or both.