Jerusalem

grey I think so, yes. It's on youtube. Maybe based on a psalm originally? goes to google again.

The version we used to sing was:

Non Nobis Domine
Not unto us oh Lord
The praise and glory be
For every deed or word....

Not sure that's quite right.

It'll come back, I'm sure (got an earworm now).

But it's a psalm

Is that the one they used in Branagh's Henry V film?

Ah! Words by Rudyard Kipling; set to music by someone called Quilter for the Opening Ceremony of the 1948 Olympics.

That would make a fab National Anthem, too. Very rousing.

penstemmon we used to sing that, too! Who composed that, I wonder? goes to google.

My secondary school song was 'Non nobis domine' ..not unto us the praise!

Bit like a Whiter Shade of Pale. Both obviously written under the influence of something hallucinogenic.

Jerusalem! Rousing melody, but difficult to play. Words don't make any sense though IMO.

Much as I love Jerusalem (and many thanks for all the interesting explanations) I do remain amused by such a stirring song whose responses should be: No, No, No, No, Get them yourself.

merlot yes that is poignant.
The one that always got me was 'Lord dismiss us with thy blessing' sung at the end of every term, with the immortal line 'time that's lost may all retrieve'
As if

My school adopted Harrow School's 'Forty Years On' as did a few other all girls schools.

I always loved the words and the last verse is now so meaningful.

Forty years on, growing older and older,
Shorter in wind, as in memory long,
Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,
What will it help you that once you were strong?
God gives us bases to guard or beleaguer,
Games to play out, whether earnest or fun,
Fights for the fearless, and goals for the eager,
Twenty, and thirty, and forty years on!

I think it was because the word 'tower' came at the end of a line and the two syllable came out a bit straggly...

Good job you didn't have to sing 'castle' then.

Our school hymn was 'Thee will I love, my God and King'.

Don't think I've ever heard it sung outside that school although I can still remember the words.

The music teacher made us sing 'tar' instead of 'tower' because she said our northern vowels sounded common!

Ours was Gaudeamus Igitur sung in Latin (a shortened version)
I don't think they realised it was a popular drinking song

So there you are OP......you pays yer money and takes yer choice!

Jerusalem was our school song. I think we all sang 'the' dark, satanic mills.
Like Iam I just assumed it was a reference to the cotton mills of the northwest where I grew up and where my grandmother worked from the age of 12.

I sing 'those'

Just checking in the hymn book
Yes, it is 'those' in 'Hymns Old and New'

My favourite hymn and it reminds me too of school.
I note that someone said the words are Quaker - our headmistress was a Quaker.
www.qhpress.org/quakerpages/qwhp/soma.htm
I don't particularly want a religious funeral but I would like that one sung - or at least played.
'Forgive our foolish ways' very apt!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk7SX3r59sc
Lovely

I'll give you that one ?!

Yes. I loved Repton; reminds me of my first year in Secondary School.

He must be a teeny bit Welsh to have written hymns like that....

Laying aside the symbolism of Blake's text, didn't Hubert Parry always write a bloody good tune!

Many years ago a teacher said that we might one day understand the words we sang so enthusiastically. Here's a brief explanation
Famously, Blake asks four questions in succession, and the answer to each is a resounding no. Christ’s feet never trod in England; the Lamb of God didn’t gambol – preposterous as the image is – around the Cotswolds; the Holy Spirit wasn’t regularly spotted in London fog; and most directly of all, there was no sense of Jerusalem in the dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Age. The consequent fantasy of building a New Jerusalem in England is widely understood by anyone who studies Blake to be a stonking parody of Napoleonic Era nationalism. Even in 1804, no one sung and danced about their own ‘mental fight’ and expected to be taken seriously.

Instead, Jerusalem encapsulates Blake’s fears about the all-too-easy suppression of the individual spirit. The ‘Satanic mills’ may refer to the Albion Flour Mills, large-scale mills near Blake’s home which were burned down anonymously after they threatened to put smaller millers out of business. (So, Jerusalem as an anthem would celebrate anti-capitalist arson. Which makes us virtually French.) But when Blake wrote about ‘mills’ elsewhere he usually used them as a metaphor for institutionalised religion – which, like Marx after him, he considered the natural ally of capitalism and monarchy.
Makes you think doesn't it!

P.S.. When we planned assemblies at school we always either chose Jerusalem or To be a pilgrim love both . Plenty of hywel.if that is spelt right

I've always sung 'these'?? The Lord's Prayer is different in Scotland as well.