This hymn has been ascribed to Ambrose for centuries, which makes an instructive pairing with the Hymn of the Day, where the attribution is secure. Here it is not: the editors judge it almost certainly not his, and probably no older than the tenth century. The medieval Latin opened “Vox clara ecce intonat,” “Lo, a clear voice thunders.” Then Pope Urban VIII, who reigned from 1623, ordered the breviary hymns rewritten to fit classical Latin meter, and the line became the metrically correct but less singable “En clara vox redarguit.” The revisions were never popular, and they stood for three centuries until the original wording was restored between 1971 and 1974. Edward Caswall translated the papal version, not the original, in 1849, and his own first line has since been revised too: he wrote “Hark! an awful voice is sounding,” using awful in its older sense of awe-inspiring. One small change is worth noticing. Caswall wrote “Cast away the dreams of darkness”; our hymnal reads “works of darkness,” putting the closing hymn into the exact words of the Epistle. The last stanza ends where Advent ends, in the Maranatha of Revelation 22: “Come quickly, King of kings!”
Sung at Our Saviour
2025