O Key of David - Tasmin Jones

Commissioned by the Church of England for Advent, 2025

St Martin's Voices

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;  you open and no one can shut;  you shut and no one can open:  Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,  those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. 

The Scriptures referenced here are from Isaiah and Psalm 102 and 106.

Here is an interesting blog post from 2013 about some anonymous Anglo-Saxon poetic meditations on the O Antiphons and this one in particular.  I'll tempt any Tolkien fans out there to read it with this:

This poem takes its main inspiration from the final line of the antiphon: 'those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death'. Its interest is in light and darkness, and in the language of secrecy and hidden things - especially geryne, 'mystery'. (Not to make the Advent Lyrics all about Tolkien - since tomorrow is 'O Earendel' - but I particularly noted the line þæt degol wæs, dryhtnes geryne, 'that was a secret, the Lord's mystery', because degol is the origin of the name Déagol, who was secretly murdered by Sméagol.) The Key of David is to unlock not only the road to heaven, but the secrets concealed on earth. He will give us strength in mode, 'mind, spirit', and tydre gewitt tire bewinde, 'enfold our frail wits in splendour', as if limited human understanding is to be entirely wrapped and wound within limitless divine wisdom. Another Old English poem (Exodus), counselling on the interpretation of the scriptures, uses comparable language in its metaphor of the keys of the spirit:

I'm not all that big on Tolkien, myself.   I'd have gone on and on about an earlier passage in the post but I did that yesterday.  

There is an edition of the Exeter Book available online which contains the poems referred to online,  with an edition of the original and a translation into modern English (my one course in Anglo-Saxon poetry ended close to sixty years ago).  It's a bit of work to find what I assume the writer of the post refers to, they seem to be embedded into longer meditations on the Nativity.  Those start at page 26 in the pdf, the modern translation more or less on what I'd guess are the facing pages in the printed book .