Lyrics
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout heaven's eternal days.
On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And heaven's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.
Public domain hymn text (1855; English translation 1899). Words by William Rees, English translation by William Edwards.
The Story Behind the Hymn
William Rees, a Welsh Congregationalist minister writing under the bardic name Gwilym Hiraethog, included 'Here Is Love, Vast as the Ocean' (Welsh: 'Dyma Gariad Fel y Moroedd') in his 1855 collection Caniadau Hiraethog, having first published the text a few years earlier; the hymn draws on the sea imagery deeply familiar to Wales's own coastal geography and culture.
Its original Welsh title, 'Dyma Gariad Fel y Moroedd,' translates directly to the hymn's central image, love 'like the seas,' an image Welsh hymnody returned to repeatedly given the country's long, close relationship with the surrounding ocean.
The hymn was translated into English by William Edwards, published in The Baptist Book of Praise in 1899, and it is most commonly sung today to the tune EBENEZER, also known as TON-Y-BOTEL, composed by Thomas J. Williams in 1890, one of the most recognized Welsh hymn tunes used across English-language hymnody.
That tune's popular alternate name, TON-Y-BOTEL, meaning 'tune in a bottle,' comes from a persistent but almost certainly false legend claiming the melody was found inside a bottle washed ashore, a story with no historical basis but one that has followed the tune for over a century regardless.
The hymn's central metaphor, treating love as something whose scale can only be measured against the vastness of the ocean itself, avoids more common measured or quantified images of grace, instead reaching for something the singer could not fully take in even while looking directly at it.
Its second verse shifts to the language of flooding rivers and floodgates, extending the water imagery from the opening verse's ocean into an even more forceful, overflowing picture of grace breaking through every available boundary.
The hymn remains one of the best-known Welsh hymns in English-language use today, valued both for Rees's original imagery and for its strong association with a Welsh hymn tune tradition recognized well beyond Wales itself for its distinctive musical power.
