It’s the first line of a pretty Christian hymn by Eleanor Farjeon, some of the rest of which goes:
Morning has broken
Like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird.
Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
Praise for them, springing
Fresh from the world!…
Mine is the sunlight!
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light
Eden saw play!
Praise with elation,
Praise every morning,
God’s re-creation
Of the new day!
And it’s the small work for which Farjeon is best known outside her native England, largely due to the 1972 recording by the then “Cat Stevens,” who later rebranded himself as “Yusuf Islam.” (he’s since backtracked a bit from his more extreme ideas, as you can see from his Wikipedia page.)
I like his recording, although if it skeeves you somewhat, you can look around and find ones by artists as diverse as the late Judith Durham, Judy Collins, Esther Ofarim (she of Cinderella Rockefella fame), Nana Mouskouri, Pam Tillis, Roger Whittaker, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:
In each case, the tune is Scottish, the lovely Bunessan.
In the weird way the mind works, this cultural remnant came to mind when I read that today-September 28, 2024– is the 958th anniversary of William, Duke of Normandy’s landing on the southeast coast of England, as he started his invasion of enemy territory. Slightly more than two weeks later, on October 14, William mowed down the forces of Harold II (Godwinson) of England. The rest is history, and William had himself crowned King of the English and head of the House of Normandy, on Christmas Day 1066.
This got me to thinking of a seminal book of my childhood, Kings and Queens, which contains poems about all the English monarchs from William I through George V.
Auntie Pat’s 1936 edition, just four years after it was first published
The poems are by Eleanor and her brother Herbert, and were subsequently updated to include monarchs through Elizabeth II.
So when I discovered, quite fortuitously, that today was the anniversary of William’s landing, the first thing to run through my mind was the first poem from the book, most of which I still have memorized:
William The First was the first of our kings
Not counting Ethelberts, Alfreds and things;
He had himself crowned, anointed and blessed
In Ten-Sixty I needn’t tell you the rest!Now being a Norman King William the First
By the Saxons he’d conquered was hated and cursed;
They planned and they plotted far into the night,
Which William could tell from their candles alight.So William decided these rebels to quell
By inventing the Curfew, a sort of a bell,
And if any Saxon was found out of bed
After eight o’clock sharp it was off with his head!
And so on. I learned quite a bit of British history, courtesy of Eleanor and Herbert, and for that I’m eternally grateful.
Eleanor Farjeon died on June 5, 1965. She was an invalid for much of her childhood, suffering from ill-health and poor eyesight, and credited much of her literary inspiration as coming from her childhood and her family holidays.
Bless. I can drink to that myself, as many regular readers can probably attest.
Rest in Peace.
