Charles Wesley: The Poet Who Never Learned to Stop

Somewhere around 8,989 hymns. That's the count historian Dr. Frank Baker arrived at after combing through Charles Wesley's life's work * — a number that still shocks me every time I think about it. Baker calculated that Wesley averaged ten lines of verse a day, every day, for fifty years. He finished a complete poem roughly every other day of his adult life. Try to imagine keeping that pace for even a month.

And here's the detail that matters most for what we do at Hymnbook Treasures: every one of those nearly 9,000 works was words. As far as we know, Charles Wesley never wrote a note of music. He wrote poetry — dense with Scripture, aching with personal testimony, built for congregations to sing — and left the music to other people, sometimes people who weren't even born yet when he wrote the text. "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" wasn't sung to the melody we know today (MENDELSSOHN) until 1861 — decades after Wesley died — when William H. Cummings adapted a Mendelssohn cantata tune to fit the words. The words came first. The words outlasted every melody that ever tried to carry them.

That's exactly why this calendar exists the way it does. Tunes drift or get regionalized, modernized, or forgotten as the decades and centuries pass. But Wesley's words — "long my imprisoned spirit lay," "here would I touch and handle things unseen" — have been doing their quiet work in believers' hearts for nearly three centuries, independent of whatever tune happened to be attached in a given decade.

Not every one of Wesley's hymns had an easy road to the hymnal, either. Take "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" — today considered one of his finest. When Charles's brother John sat down in 1780 to edit the definitive Methodist hymn collection, he left this one out. The language, with its plea to "let me to Thy bosom fly," struck John as too tender, too intimate for public worship. It sat outside the official hymnal for the rest of Charles's life. It wasn't until 1797 — six years after John himself had died — that a Methodist hymnal finally included it. The preacher and the poet, two brothers who built a movement together, simply disagreed about how close a hymn was allowed to bring a worshiper to Christ. History sided with the poet.

Twenty-eight of Charles Wesley's hymns found their way into Hymnbook Treasures — more than any other single lyricist in the collection. Some days you'll meet him at his most triumphant ("Christ the Lord Is Risen Today"), some days at his most theologically bold ("And Can It Be"), and at least one day, in August, you'll meet him at his most tender — the hymn his own brother once thought was too much.

Ready to hold a little more of that poetry in your hands, one day at a time? Check out the Hymnbook Treasures calendar.

* Charles Wesley's Verse: An Introduction (London: Epworth Press, 1964; revised/2nd ed. 1988)