332. Rejoice, Ye Pure in Heart

The Story Behind the Hymn

Edward Hayes Plumptre wrote "Rejoice, Ye Pure in Heart" in 1865 for a very specific practical purpose: as a processional hymn for the annual choral festival at Peterborough Cathedral, England, first sung there that May. Cathedral processionals of the era could take anywhere from ten to thirty minutes as multiple choirs filed in and took their places, and Plumptre needed a hymn substantial enough to fill that span without running dry — his original text ran to eleven full stanzas.

Plumptre, educated at University College, Oxford, was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1846 and went on to a distinguished academic career, serving as chaplain and professor of New Testament exegesis at King's College, London, and later as dean of Queen's College, Oxford. The hymn was published in the third edition of his Lazarus and Other Poems in 1868, and in the same year appeared in the influential appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Because the hymn was built for a moving procession rather than a stationary act of praise, its structure differs from most hymns of the period: short, repeatable stanzas built around a compact refrain — "Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice, give thanks and sing" — designed to carry a crowd forward rather than hold it in place, verse after verse, for as long as the procession required.

The tune most commonly paired with the text today, MARION, was composed nearly two decades after Plumptre wrote the words, by Arthur H. Messiter in 1883, and first published a decade after that in the music collection used at Trinity Church in New York — carrying a hymn written for one specific English cathedral procession into congregations on an entirely different continent.