He sits on the rocks below Berry Head on a September evening in 1847 and watches the light leave the water. Behind him stands the house his wife’s money bought, the long library that will take seventeen days to auction once he is gone. Below him Brixham harbor holds the last of the sun. The trawlers ride at anchor. The herring men are home. Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847) is fifty-four, and he is dying, and he knows it, the way a man knows it when the cough has been with him for years and the doctors have tried blistering and bleeding and calomel and tartar emetic and large doses of Prussic acid and none of it has held the thing back.
He has preached his last sermon, or he will within days, a sermon on the Holy Communion, and he drags himself to the pulpit against his family’s pleading because, as he likes to say, it is better to wear out than to rust out. Tonight he climbs back to the study and writes eight stanzas and sets them to a tune of his own. He hands the page to a relative. Weeks later he reaches Nice and can go no farther, and there he dies, and the men who sit with him at the end report that his last words are “Peace! Joy!”
The page opens: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.”
Ernest Becker (1924-1974), in The Denial of Death (1973), wrote that every culture is a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that you are an object of first value in a world that will go on without you. The animal knows it will die. The terror under that knowledge is the engine beneath all the building and the praying and the fighting and the getting of sons. A hero system hands a man a way to stand past his own death, a way to feel his small life joined to something that does not end. Each system sets its own terms. The terms tell a man what a good death looks like and what the worst death would be, and the two are never the same from one hall to the next.
Lyte’s terms sit on the page he hands his relative, and read as a hero system, one word carries the load. The word is “abide.” It means stay. It comes from the road to Emmaus, where two men press an unrecognized Christ to remain with them, for it is toward evening and the day is far spent. Lyte takes their words into his own mouth at his own eventide.
What he asks for is company. He does not ask to be spared. He does not ask to be carried bodily past the grave. He asks that he not be left. “When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me.” The fear named in the hymn is not extinction. It is abandonment.
A man writes the hero system his life has prepared him to write. Lyte’s father, Captain Thomas Lyte, an army officer fonder of fishing and shooting than of his children, walked out on the family. The mother, Anna Maria, took the children to London and died there with the youngest boy. The two surviving sons were left. A schoolmaster at Portora, Robert Burrowes, took the orphan in and treated him as an adopted son, one more shelter that could be withdrawn. Then at Marazion in 1818 a brother clergyman, Abraham Swanne, fell ill, and Lyte sat with him while he died, and the dying man’s account of his own salvation, that though he had erred there was One whose death would answer for him, turned Lyte’s faith from a profession into an urgency. He went back to his Bible. He began to preach as a man who had watched a man die.
Here, then, is a life made of people leaving. The father leaves. The mother dies. The benefactor is borrowed. The friend dies in his arms. The man who has been left this often builds his whole scheme of cosmic heroism around the single Companion who changes not and will not go. “O Thou who changest not, abide with me.” Against a father who left stands a Father who stays. Becker would say the hero system takes the common dread of death and bends it to the private dread this one man carries, then answers that. Lyte’s death is abandonment. His answer is presence.
Even the triumph is leased to it. The seventh stanza reaches for Paul: “Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?” The line that follows hands the victory back on a condition. “I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.” The conquest of the grave is rented to the Companion’s staying. Take the abiding away and the triumph falls. Few hero systems name their load-bearing term so plainly.
Carry the word into other halls and watch it lose its sense.
The Norse warrior in the hall does not fear being left. He fears dying in the straw, indoors, unwitnessed, the death no man will sing. His companion is the lord he falls beside in the shield wall, and what he wants from him is not company through a long quiet dying but a death loud enough to be carried home and made into a lay. Sing “abide with me” to him as a thing whispered from a sickbed and he hears a coward’s wish. The death Lyte is having, the slow one in the warm room with the family near, is the worst death his system can name.
The Confucian official fears another end. He fears the line closing, the ancestral tablet left undusted, no son to set out the rice and the incense and call the dead by name on the proper days. His presence runs both directions along the family, back toward the men he tends and forward toward the men who will tend him. Ask him who must abide and he does not point to Heaven. He points to his son. The companion who must not leave is the heir, and the abiding he wants is the boy who stays to bury him in order and to feed him after.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) would read the hymn as a relapse. The Stoic spends his life training out the very wish the hymn makes. To beg a companion not to leave is to hang your peace on a thing outside your hands, and the whole labor of the Stoic is to want nothing he can lose. He rehearses the morning when he and everyone he loves will be gone, and he assents. He does not ask the cosmos to abide with him. He asks to need no one. Lyte’s cure is a Presence. The Stoic’s cure is to close the wound that wants one.
The Theravada monk turns the hymn inside out. The craving to be abided with is the sickness his whole practice treats. The wish that something stay, that the self go on attended and accompanied, is the thirst that ties a man to the wheel and brings him back and back. Release is non-abiding, the blowing out of the flame, the end of asking anyone to stay, the self included. Lyte’s last petition is the monk’s last attachment. What Lyte calls comfort the monk calls the chain.
Move to the present and find the engineer north of San Francisco who keeps a contract with a firm that will freeze his head. He does not fear abandonment, and he does not want a Companion through his dying. He wants no dying. Death is to him a fault in the equipment, a problem of preservation now and restoration later. His abiding is the pattern held intact in the cold until the machines grow good enough to run it again. Tell him the cure for the eventide is to ask Someone to sit beside you while the light goes, and he hears a man who has given up. He has not moved the victory anywhere. He still means to win the old one, the survival of the self, by other means.
Closest to Lyte stands the poet who fears ceasing before the work is done, the man who has fears that he may cease to be before his pen has gleaned his teeming brain. John Keats (1795-1821), coughing out his own lungs a generation ahead of Lyte, wants the line to outlast the body. Lyte the prize poet half shares the wager and, by his own lights, wins it twice, for the hymn outlives him and he dies sure the Companion does too.
One word. To the warrior it names a coward’s wish. To the official it names a duty owed by sons. To the Stoic it names a weakness to drill away. To the monk it names a chain. To the engineer it names surrender. To the dying curate on the rocks it is the whole of his hope, and it makes full and exact sense only inside the hall where he sings it.
The hall did not hold. Hero systems are hungry, and a sacred thing made inside one gets pulled into others and set to serve their terror instead.
William Henry Monk (1823-1889) set Lyte’s words to the tune almost everyone now hears, “Eventide,” written for Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861. The story attached to it is that Monk wrote the melody soon after his own small daughter died, so the tune that carries a dying man’s plea carries a grieving father’s too, two deathbeds folded into one page of music.
From there the hymn went where its writer never sent it. Soldiers of empire took it up, Charles Gordon (1833-1885) and Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916) among them, men whose system feared a forgotten death, not an unaccompanied one. Edith Cavell (1865-1915) is said to have had its words with her before the German rifles. George V (1865-1936) had it sung at his funeral. Since 1927 the crowd at the English Cup Final has sung it before the kickoff, tens of thousands of men who have come to watch other men contend for a name that lasts, roaring a dying curate’s request for quiet company into a wall of sound against being nobody and being forgotten.
Becker would not be surprised. The private prayer for a Companion becomes a tribal token against oblivion. The same eight stanzas serve the man who fears being left and the stadium that fears being no one. The word stays on the page. The hall around it keeps changing, and the word comes to mean what the hall needs it to mean.
On the rocks the light has almost gone. Lyte sits a while with the harbor going dark below him and the moor black against the last of the sky. He has stopped asking to be spared. He asks only that he not go into the dark alone, that the one Companion of a life full of departures keep the appointment this once.
He goes up to the house. His family thinks he is resting. He is finishing the hymn. In a few weeks he will lie in a hotel room in Nice with strangers around the bed, and he will say “Peace! Joy!” and be gone, and the page will outlast him. Whether the Companion kept the appointment is the question his whole hero system was built to answer yes, and the one no hero system can answer from outside the hall.
