“I Vow to Thee, My Country” is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921, when music by Gustav Holst had a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to it. The music originated as a wordless melody, which Holst later named “Thaxted”, taken from the “Jupiter…
“I Vow to Thee, My Country” is a British patriotic hymn, created in 1921, when music by Gustav Holst had a poem by Sir Cecil Spring Rice set to it. The music originated as a wordless melody, which Holst later named “Thaxted”, taken from the “Jupiter” movement of Holst's 1917 suite “The Planets”.
The origin of the hymn’s text is a poem by diplomat Sir Cecil Spring Rice, written in 1908 or 1912, entitled “Urbs Dei” ("The City of God”) or “The Two Fatherlands”. The poem described how a Christian owes his loyalties to both his homeland and the heavenly kingdom.
In 1908, Spring Rice was posted to the British Embassy in Stockholm. In 1912, he was appointed as Ambassador to the United States of America, where he influenced the administration of Woodrow Wilson to abandon neutrality and join Britain in the war against Germany. After the United States entered the war, he was recalled to Britain. Shortly before his departure from the US in January 1918, he rewrote and renamed “Urbs Dei”, significantly altering the first verse to concentrate on the themes of love and sacrifice rather than “the noise of battle" and “the thunder of her guns”, creating a more somber tone in view of the dreadful loss of life suffered in the Great War. The first verse in both versions invoke Britain (in the 1912 version, anthropomorphized as Britannia with sword and shield; in the second version, simply called “my country”); the second verse, the Kingdom of Heaven.
According to Sir Cecil’s granddaughter, the rewritten verse of 1918 was never intended to appear alongside the first verse of the original poem but was replacing it; the original first verse is nevertheless sometimes known as the “rarely sung middle verse”. The text of the original poem was sent by Spring Rice to William Jennings Bryan in a letter shortly before his death in February 1918.
The poem circulated privately for a few years until it was set to music by Holst, to a tune he adapted from his “Jupiter” to fit the words of the poem. It was performed as a unison song with orchestra in the early 1920s, and it was finally published as a hymn in 1925/6 in the “Songs of Praise” hymnal (no. 188).
“I Vow to Thee, My Country” was voted as the UK’s sixth favorite hymn in a 2019 poll by the religious show “Songs of Praise”.
