Is His heart to sinners cold?
The poet answers his questions in the following stanzas by assuring himself that the Sun of God’s grace can and will pierce even his “cloud of despair”, and that he must wait therefore in quietness and trust:
O my soul, be quiet then!
Jesus will redress thy sadness,
Jesus will restore thy gladness,
Jesus will thy help remain.
Jesus is thy solace ever
And thy hope in life and death;
Jesus will thee soon deliver;
Thou must cling to that blest faith.
The uncertainty of life and its fortunes furnished a favored theme for many of his
hymns, as for instance in the splendid—
Sorrow and gladness oft journey together,
Trouble and happiness swift company keep;
Luck and misfortune change like the weather;
Sunshine and clouds quickly vary their sweep.
which is, poetically at least, one of his finest compositions. The poet’s own career so far had been one of continuous and rather swift advancement. But there was, if not in his own outward fortune, then in the fortunes of other notables of his day, enough to remind him of the inconstancy of worldly honor and glory.
Only a few months before the publication of his hymns, Leonora Christine Ulfeldt, the once beautiful, admired and talented daughter of Christian IV, had been released from twenty-two years of imprisonment in a bare and almost lightless prison-cell; Peder Griffenfeldt, a man who from humble antecedents swiftly had risen to become the most powerful man in the kingdom, had been stript even more swiftly of all his honors and thrown into a dismal prison on a
rocky isle by the coast of Norway; and there were other and well known instances of swift changes in the fortunes of men in those days when they were
subject not only to the ordinary vicissitudes of human existence but to the fickle humor of an absolute monarch. It is, therefore, as though Kingo at the height of his own fortune would remind himself of the quickness with which it might vanish, of the evanescense and vanity of all worldly glory. That idea is strikingly emphasized in the following famous hymn:
Vain world, fare thee well!
I purpose no more in thy bondage to dwell;
The burdens which thou hast enticed me to bear,
I cast now aside with their troubles and care.
I spurn thy allurements, which tempt and appall;
’Tis vanity all!
What merit and worth
Hath all that the world puts so temptingly forth!
It is naught but bubbles and tinctured glass,
Loud clamoring cymbals and shrill sounding brass.
What are their seductions which lure and enthrall;
’Tis vanity all!
O honor and gold,
Vain idols which many with worship behold!
False are your affluence, your pleasure and fame;
Your wages are envy, deception and shame,
Your garlands soon wither, your kingdom shall fall;
’Tis vanity all!
O carnal desire,
Thou tempting, consuming and treacherous fire,
That catches like tinder and scorches like flame,
Consigning the victim to sorrow and shame,
Thy honeyest potion is wormwood and gall;
’Tis vanity all!
Then, fare thee farewell,
Vain world, with thy tempting and glamorous spell!
Thy wiles shall no longer my spirit enslave,
Thy splendor and joy are designed for the grave
I yearn for the solace from sorrows and harm
Of Abraham’s arm!
