Lyrics
My Lord has garments so wondrous fine,
And myrrh their texture fills;
Its fragrance reached to this heart of mine,
With joy my being thrills.
Out of the ivory palaces
Into a world of woe,
Only His great eternal love
Made my Savior go.
His life had also its sorrows sore,
For aloes had a part;
And when I think of the cross He bore,
My eyes with teardrops start.
His garments, too, were in cassia dipped,
With healing in a touch;
Each time my feet in some sin have slipped,
He took me from its clutch.
In garments glorious He will come,
To open wide the door;
And I shall enter my heavenly home,
To dwell forevermore.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1915). Words and music by Henry Barraclough.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Henry Barraclough, an English organist and pianist trained from the age of five, joined the evangelistic team of Presbyterian evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman and song director Charles M. Alexander in 1914, traveling with them from England to the United States. In 1915, at a Presbyterian conference in Montreat, North Carolina, Chapman preached a sermon on Psalm 45:8 — "All Thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made Thee glad."
Barraclough later described how, riding back to the hotel through the mountains after the service, the shape of a hymn began forming in his mind almost on its own. He scribbled the words down during the drive, working out both the text and its tune from that single verse of Scripture — the idea of Christ leaving glory, described in the sensory language of royal garments and fragrant spices, for the "world of woe" He came to save.
The hymn was performed the very next day, sung by Mrs. Alexander and Albert Brown, giving it an unusually fast turnaround from private inspiration to public debut — written on a mountain drive one evening, sung before a congregation the following morning.
Its central image, garments touched by myrrh, aloes, and cassia, ties each verse to a different facet of Christ's life: fragrance and joy in the first, sorrow and the cross in the second, healing in the third, and final glory in the fourth — a structure built entirely out of the details of a single Old Testament verse most readers would otherwise pass by without a second look.
