Laetatus sum

Top Media Text Author Text Info Tune Timeline Page Scans Instances

I did in heart rejoyce

Author: William Kethe
Tune: O SEIGNEUR
Published in 3 hymnals

Audio files: MIDI

Representative Text

1 I did in heart rejoice
to hear the people's voice
In offering so willingly:
For let us up, say they,
And in the Lord's house pray:
Thus spake the folk with amity.

2 Our feet that wander'd wide
shall in thy gates abide,
O thou Jerusalem full fair;
Which art so seemly set
Much like a city neat,
Whither the people do repair.

3 The tribes with one accord
to give thanks to the Lord
Are thither bent their way to take:
So God before did tell
That there his Israel
their prayers should together make.

4 For there are thrones erect,
and that for this respect,
To set forth justice orderly:
Which thrones right to maintain,
To David's house remain,
his folk to judge with equity.

5 To pray let us not cease
for Jerusalem's peace:
Thy friends God keep in amity;
Peace be thy walls about;
And prosper thee throughout
thy palaces continually.

6 For my friends sake will I
wish that prosperity
May evermore abide in thee:
God's house doth me allure
Thy wealth for to procure
as much as always lies in me.

Source: The Whole Book of Psalms #CXXII

All representative texts • Compare texts ^ top

Author: William Kethe

William Kethe (b. Scotland [?], d. Dorset England, c. 1594). Although both the time and place of Kethe's birth and death are unknown, scholars think he was a Scotsman. A Protestant, he fled to the continent during Queen Mary's persecution in the late 1550s. He lived in Geneva for some time but traveled to Basel and Strasbourg to maintain contact with other English refugees. Kethe is thought to be one of the scholars who translated and published the English-language Geneva Bible (1560), a version favored over the King James Bible by the Pilgrim fathers. The twenty-five psalm versifications Kethe prepared for the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1561 were also adopted into the Scottish Psalter of 1565. His versification of Psalm 100 (All People that… Go to person page >

^ top

First Line:	I did in heart rejoyce
Title:	Laetatus sum
Author:	William Kethe
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

Psalm 122
(hymns)

^ top

Tune

O SEIGNEUR

GENEVAN 3 is the first of some fourteen tunes in the Psalter Hymnal credited to Louis Bourgeois (b. Paris, France, c. 1510; d. Paris, 1561), who was the primary musical editor of the Genevan Psalter. In both his early and later years Bourgeois wrote French songs to entertain the rich, but in the his…

Go to tune page >

All tunes published with 'Laetatus sum'^ top