


And for sheer polyphonic sweetness, what can compare with Palestrina’s Sicut cervus? But we don’t need the great ones for this hymn. Handel wrote a fine oratorio from the psalm, using Tate’s and Brady’s first line as his own. Saint Augustine echoes it all the time, especially when he thinks about what he was as a young man, when he did not know God, but he longed to, and he was caught up in both error and sin. They were the deer in the psalm, refreshing themselves - and so they represented all of us, because we are like those deer, as with the psalmist we say, “My soul thirsts for God, the living God.” I’m far from alone in loving that psalm almost the best of all. A nearby tour guide said, in English, that the deer symbolized the apostles, but that wasn’t true, I told my children. John Lateran, in Rome, and we were looking at a glorious mosaic, in which were pictured, among other wonderful things, some deer sipping at the water of a rushing brook. So they collaborated in doing just that for all the psalms, among which is our hymn, “As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams.” Tate and Brady were a couple of Irishmen with a turn for poetry, and a real sense that the best way for English speakers to sing Hebrew poetry would be for them to sing it as English poetry. Our Hymn of the Week is one of the most moving of all the psalms, the forty-second, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,” set into English verse by Nahum Tate and Dr.
