If fancy plumes aerial flight,
Go fix thy restless mind
On learning’s lore and wisdom’s might,
And live to bless mankind.
The sword is sheathed, ’tis freedom’s hour,
No despot bears misrule,
Where knowledge plants the foot of power
In our God-blessed free school….¹

As 1910 dawned, Eddy asked her secretary Adam Dickey to gather her poems for publication. A volume titled Poems, containing 48 of the 104 that she had written over the course of her lifetime, was printed that September. Dickey began its preface with this observation:

The poems garnered up in this little volume were written at different periods in the life of the author, dating from her early girlhood up to recent years. They were not written with a view of making a book, each poem being the spontaneous outpouring of a deeply poetic nature and called forth by some experience that claimed her attention.²

John Randall Dunn, himself a poet,³ was Editor of the Christian Science periodicals from 1943 to 1948. In a 1947 article titled “Appreciation of Mrs. Eddy’s poetry,” he noted:

It is a mistake to read Mrs. Eddy’s verse as one would some classic poem, seeking therein only intellectual enjoyment. Throughout her whole human experience this extraordinary mentality was plumbing the depths of spiritual consciousness and striving through the media of poesy and prose to convey to others at least a modicum of the truths she discovered.⁴

The seven poems that became hymns represent the epitome of Eddy’s poetic output, their concepts so eloquently expressed. They speak directly to the heart, while at the same time equal her most thoughtful prose in precisely stating spiritual ideas. The February 1914 Christian Science Journal reprinted an article from The Christian Science Monitor, observing how the poems “were written in the midst of an enormous activity, during the years when she was declaring, teaching, and establishing Christian Science and its world-wide organization.” It went on to say that these poems “express herself,—aspiration, abnegation, struggle, victory, unselfish love; the sorrowing and triumphing Leader, the friend of humanity, the mother of her flock.”⁵

The inspiration to write poetry, and the comfort Eddy received from it, sustained her during dark periods in life, including the death of her husband George Washington Glover in June 1844, only months into their marriage.⁶

Constant ill health, separation in 1851 from their young son, George, and increasingly strained relationships with other family members, caused a deep feeling of aloneness. Soon after Eddy’s watershed 1866 healing, her husband Daniel Patterson deserted her. In August 1867 we witness the increasing spirituality of her thought in a poem titled “Alone.” The beginning of stanza three shows the tenor and strength of her poetic expression, which would be expanded into “Christ My Refuge,” the first of her poems that were eventually set to music and included in the 1892 Christian Science Hymnal:

And o’er the harp strings of the soul
Sweet sounds this trembling echo roll….⁷

“Christ My Refuge” (1868)

Eddy published the original version of this poem, with eight verses, in the Lynn Reporter on February 15, 1868. It was also published that August in the Amesbury Villager, with slight revisions.

“Christ My Refuge” clearly indicates Eddy’s yearning to let the Christ-spirit lift her thought above the waves of doubt and fear. She fixes her sight “on God, the rock upon my shore,” and asks to be borne “upward to a world of light.” In The History of The Christian Science Movement, William Lyman Johnson states that “Christ My Refuge” was “born of hard and bitter experience, but it leads the reader up out of sickness and sin by distinct steps, to the perfect vision.”⁸

In her work No and Yes, Eddy stated that “Christian Science involves a new language …. It is the ‘new tongue’ of Truth, having its best interpretation in the power of Christianity to heal.”⁹ In the original version of “Christ My Refuge,” we see her confronting the challenge of finding the language to express spiritual truths. As she would eventually elevate and clarify the language in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, so she continued to improve the language in “Christ My Refuge,” revising this poem again and again over the next two decades. In his 1930 biography of Eddy, Episcopal minister Lyman Powell noted, “Perhaps nowhere has Mrs. Eddy indicated more vividly her love and loyalty to Christ Jesus than in her poem [‘Christ My Refuge’].”¹⁰

Comparing the original poem to its final version, with its reordered verses, one sees how Eddy’s budding ideas in the first six stanzas of the original were eventually refined and clarified in the final expression. She eventually removed two of the original eight verses, and the concluding verse in the final version represents a completely new thought.

Original Version
“Christ Our Refuge”

1 Over the voice-harp of my soul
There sweeps a hand –
Beyond this mortal, weak control –
From some soft band

2 Of ministries, a white-winged throng
Of thoughts illumed
By God, and breathed in raptured song
With love perfumed.

3 And in this unveiled presence grew
A ladder bright,
Rising to bear me upward to
A world of light.

4 Not from this earthly home afar,
But nearer Thee,
Father, to shine a loving star
O’er crystal sea.

5 Over the waves of doubt and fear –
Time’s Galilee –
Aid me to walk, Christ ever near
To strengthen me.

6 And fix my sight on God, the rock
Upon my shore,
‘Gainst which the winds and waves may shock,
Oh, nevermore!

7 I am no reed to shake at scorn
Or hate of man;
I am no medium but Truth’s, to warn
The creedish clan’

8 ‘Gainst their oppression and their wrong;
To crucify
The Christ whose deeds they must prolong,
To hold Him high.

Eddy was attentive to the quality of the music wedded to her poems and was in touch with the church Directors about her hymns. Six years after the 1898 revision, she was apparently not satisfied with Brackett’s tunes and requested Johnson to compose “a proper tune for her poems ‘Shepherd Show Me How to Go’ [discussed later in this chapter] and ‘O’er Waiting Harpstrings’.” She continued, “The tunes in which I hear those hymns sung continually, no more express my verse than the poor musician’s compositions express your cultured idea of music.”¹¹

Johnson immediately composed two new tunes, and those settings appeared in the 1905 printing of the Hymnal—“‘Feed My Sheep’” (Hymn 161) and “Christ My Refuge” (Hymn 179). The tune name he later gave to “‘Feed My Sheep’” was CONCORD. To “Christ My Refuge” he later gave the name PLEASANT STREET, an obvious tribute to Pleasant View, Eddy’s home on Pleasant Street in Concord, New Hampshire. In just a matter of days, Eddy wrote Johnson a letter of thanks.¹² Although both of Johnson’s hymns eventually replaced Brackett’s tunes, they were not received with enthusiasm and were sung less frequently. When informed of this, Eddy requested that Brackett’s tunes be restored to the Hymnal.¹³

Visit Chapter 4, “The work of Lyman Brackett,” to hear a classic setting of “Christ My Refuge.”

“Communion Hymn” (1876)

The 1870s proved a busy and productive decade for Eddy. She published the first edition of Science and Health in 1875. In November of the following year, she attended the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where she was excited by an enormous display of science, technology, art, and design. Returning home, she penned an article for the Lynn Transcript, relating her wonder at all she had witnessed. The next week she submitted a poem, “Hymn of Science,” which the newspaper published on December 2. In contrast to what Eddy had seen on her trip—a presentation of the latest in scientific technology—her poem addressed the Science of Christianity, to what she called “the power of the Word.”

Original Version
“Hymn of Science”

Saw ye my Saviour? heard ye the glad sound?
Felt ye the power of the Word?
‘Twas the Truth that made us free,
And was found by you and me,
In the Life and the Love that are God.

Mourner, it calls thee–come to this Saviour;
Love wipes our tears all away,
And will lift the shades of gloom,
And for thee make blessed room
Where the darkness hath yielded to day.

Come to this fountain, all ye who thirsteth;
Drink of its life-giving stream:
‘Tis the Spirit that makes pure;
That exalts thee, and will cure
Every sorrow and sickness and sin.

Strongest deliverer, friend of the friendless,
God of all being divine:
Thou the Christ, and not the creed;
Thou the Truth, in thought and deed;
Thou the water, the bread, and the wine.¹⁴

The January 1889 Journal reported that this hymn was used in a Christmas service held in Boston’s Chickering Hall on December 23, 1888, at which Eddy preached.¹⁵ In February 1889 a third version appeared in the Journal, under the title “COMMUNION. – HYMN OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.”¹⁶ Unlike “Christ My Refuge,” which underwent several major revisions, the original version of “Communion Hymn” was closer to the final, especially verses one and four. Although it is true that Eddy continued to edit all four verses—changing a phrase here, a word there, improving the punctuation to help the sense and flow of each verse—her concept of what she wanted to express in this poem was more mature, more settled. Further changes occurred between the 1889 publication and the final version, set by Brackett in the 1892 Hymnal.

“‘Feed My Sheep’” (1887)

During the 1880s Eddy continued to strengthen her church and clarify her expression of the theology inherent in her discovery. In 1883 two significant events occurred. On April 14 The Journal of Christian Science, the first official “organ” of the church, was issued as a bimonthly publication. Then on September 21 the sixth edition of Science and Health was published, with Key to the Scriptures added to the text and title. In 1884 Eddy held a class in Chicago and also taught her first Normal class in Boston. Two years later the National Christian Scientist Association was formed in 1886.

In his 2006 volume Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism, Stephen Gottschalk wrote about Eddy’s growth in trusting “her own capacities as a leader”:

To her, these intuitions were not merely personal responses to situations, but the result of spiritual listening, of moment-by-moment waiting for God’s guidance. This conviction was well-expressed in her best-known poem, “Feed My Sheep.” Published in 1887, the poem was a prayer for guidance in the midst of a decade of turmoil, with a deluge of demands pouring in on her from all sides.¹⁹

Throughout the decade, the Christian Science movement sustained attacks from without, and possibly more dangerously from within. One result of the turmoil Gottschalk cites was the defection of 36 members of the Christian Scientist Association in 1888 and 1889. In an effort to guide her students, Eddy—wondering at that point if she should leave Boston and plant the movement elsewhere—was inspired to write this poem. Published in the March 1887 Journal, it shows how she was praying to show not only herself but her entire flock “how to go.”

Jessie Day’s 1889 hymnal (see Chapter 1) included this hymn. Set to a tune by W. Stevenson Hoyte, ST. NICHOLAS, it was the first version ever sung. “‘Feed My Sheep’” was the only poem by Eddy included in that hymnal, and there is no evidence that she was consulted.

According to an article in the February 1914 Journal, “The line ‘Tear or triumph harms’ is another example of how much meaning the writer packs into few words. Triumph harms as often as defeat, yet few that strive and ask for consolation remember to ask for protection in their victorious hour.”²⁰