Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord, for He is kind:
For His mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
He, with all-commanding might,
Filled the new-made world with light:
For His mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
All things living He doth feed,
His full hand supplies their need:
For His mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
Public domain hymn text (published 1623). Words by John Milton.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Milton, later celebrated across the English-speaking world as the author of the epic poem 'Paradise Lost' and widely regarded as one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language, wrote this hymn as a close, deliberate paraphrase of Psalm 136 when he was only fifteen years old, still a schoolboy at St. Paul's School in London, decades before any of the far more ambitious and historically significant literary works for which he would eventually become famous.
Psalm 136 is structured throughout around a single repeated refrain — 'for His mercy endureth for ever' — which follows every single individual line of the psalm without exception, a distinctive liturgical pattern believed by biblical scholars to reflect its original use in responsive worship at the ancient Israelite temple, in which a worship leader would recite each specific line describing one of God's acts, and the full assembled congregation would answer back with the identical refrain after every single line, creating a steady, insistent, communal rhythm of repeated praise. Milton's youthful paraphrase carefully preserves that same distinctive repeated structure, closing every one of its own stanzas with a slightly varied English rendering of the same recurring refrain.
Though entirely overshadowed within Milton's own body of work by his far more ambitious later literary and political achievements — he would go on to write extensively on both poetry and political theory, serve in a senior government position under Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, and eventually compose 'Paradise Lost' after going completely blind in his forties, dictating the entire twelve-book epic aloud to assistants — this early schoolboy hymn offers modern readers a rare and genuinely unusual glimpse of the future poet's own private devotional life at a very young age, composed long before the political and theological controversies of the English Civil War and its aftermath came to dominate the greater part of his adult career and reputation.
