Lyrics
The King of love my Shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am His,
And He is mine forever.
Where streams of living water flow,
My ransomed soul He leadeth;
And where the verdant pastures grow,
With food celestial feedeth.
Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed,
But yet in love He sought me;
And on His shoulder gently laid,
And home, rejoicing, brought me.
In death's dark vale I fear no ill,
With Thee, dear Lord, beside me;
Thy rod and staff my comfort still,
Thy cross before to guide me.
Thou spreadst a table in my sight;
Thy unction grace bestoweth;
And oh, what transport of delight
From Thy pure chalice floweth!
And so through all the length of days,
Thy goodness faileth never;
Good Shepherd, may I sing Thy praise
Within Thy house forever.
Public domain hymn text (1868), a paraphrase of Psalm 23.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Henry Williams Baker wrote "The King of Love My Shepherd Is" in 1868, drawing on a Welsh-language paraphrase of Psalm 23 by the sixteenth-century Welsh bishop Edmund Prys as a starting point. It first appeared that year in the appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern, the enormously influential Anglican hymnal collection Baker himself had spent years compiling and editing.
Baker, born in London in 1821 to a vice-admiral, was ordained in 1844 and spent the following twenty-six years, up to his death in 1877, as vicar of the small parish of Monkland in Herefordshire — a quiet rural posting from which he nonetheless helped shape English hymnody at a national scale through his editorial work on Hymns Ancient and Modern. The tune most closely associated with the hymn, DOMINUS REGIT ME, was composed by his friend and contemporary John Bacchus Dykes.
The connection between Baker and Dykes carried through to the end of both their lives in a way neither could have planned. When Dykes died in 1876, this hymn was sung at his funeral. Barely a year later, as Baker himself lay dying, he was heard to quote the words of the hymn's third stanza — "perverse and foolish, oft I strayed, but yet in love He sought me" — among his last words, passing, in the account of those present, "home, rejoicing."
Baker's paraphrase follows the shape of Psalm 23 closely but extends its final image considerably: where the psalm ends simply with dwelling in the house of the Lord, Baker's last stanza turns that dwelling into an eternal act of praise, closing the hymn on the same note of unfailing goodness with which it began.
