Robert Seymour Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) was an English poet, physician, hymn editor, and translator who served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1913 until his death. Born at Walmer, Kent, on October 23, 1844, he was educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He trained in medicine and practiced as a physician before leaving medical work in the early 1880s and devoting himself more fully to literature.

Bridges took a sustained interest in congregational song and the relationship between poetry and music. His Yattendon Hymnal, completed in 1899 after appearing in parts, sought high literary and musical standards and drew heavily on older hymn and psalm traditions. He also wrote A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing and later About Hymns. His original hymns, translations, and paraphrases entered a variety of English-language hymnals, and his work influenced the early twentieth-century renewal of English hymnody.

The two-stanza English poem associated with Bach’s famous WERDE MUNTER setting and beginning “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring” is commonly attributed to Bridges. Hymnological sources caution that it is not a literal translation of the German stanzas Bach used; it is better understood as a free English paraphrase inspired by Martin Janus’s hymn. Oxford University Press issued the familiar English version in 1927. Later hymnals sometimes alter the opening to “Jesus, joy of our desiring.” Bridges died at Boars Hill near Oxford on April 21, 1930.