Lyrics
Come down, O Love divine,
Seek Thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
Within my heart appear,
And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn,
Till earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let Thy glorious light
Shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
And so the yearning strong,
With which the soul will long,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace,
Till Love create a place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.
Public domain hymn text (14th century; English translation 1867). Words by Bianco da Siena, translated by Richard F. Littledale.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Bianco da Siena, a fourteenth-century Italian mystic, wrote the Italian original underlying 'Come Down, O Love Divine' as part of a body of devotional poetry produced during his years living in religious community.
The text remained in Italian for roughly five hundred years until the Anglican clergyman Richard Frederick Littledale translated it into English in 1867.
Its central request goes well beyond simply welcoming the Holy Spirit's presence, asking instead for total consumption, that 'earthly passions turn to dust and ashes' in the Spirit's heat.
The hymn's closing verse admits that the soul's longing ultimately outpaces what words can describe, resolving instead into the simple claim that only love itself can make room for the Spirit to genuinely dwell.
The hymn's most widely used tune, DOWN AMPNEY, was composed in 1906 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, making the hymn an unusually direct bridge between medieval Italian mysticism and twentieth-century English hymnody.
