Edward H. Plumptre (1821–91), clergyman, poet, and professor, wrote this text in June 1867 for King’s College Hospital in London, and published it the next year in his Lazarus and Other Poems under the heading “Hospitals,” over the words “Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.” The stanzas we sing recount Christ’s healing of the blind, the mute, and the lepers and His raising of the dead, the works by which He fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecies and showed Himself the Lord of light. Plumptre had written a further stanza, since dropped, that set those ancient miracles beside the ordinary medical healing of the hospital ward, beginning, “Though love and might no longer heal by touch, or word, or look.” The tune KINGSFOLD is an old English folk melody whose line goes back to a 1719 ballad about the pirate Gilderoy. Ralph Vaughan Williams brought it into the hymnal for the 1906 English Hymnal, naming it for the Sussex village where he had heard a Mr. Booker sing it in 1904; beyond the church the same tune carries the Irish song “The Star of the County Down.”
Sung at Our Saviour
2026