I can’t see the title of our Hymn of the Week, “Turn Back, O Man,” without seeing in my mind’s eye Mary Magdalen, or at least a woman I assumed was supposed to be she, on stage in a production of Godspell, belting out the first couple of lines in the melody and manner of a torch song. In fact, I can’t even get the melody of the first line out of my head, unless I make a concerted effort to replace it with Old 124th, the very fine air for which the poet and playwright Clifford Bax wrote the words, at the insistence of his friend, Gustav Holst, who arranged the hymn for a motet. A little more about Bax in a moment.

I think of Godspell as something of its day; it feels like a long time ago, a long personal time, that is. You had to be there, as they say. And what did I know about hymnody then? Still, a lot of the music from that play, composed by Stephen Schwartz, who is still with us, does work very well, and Schwartz was smart enough to include one or two genuine old hymns, such as “All Good Gifts,” and the prayer “Day by Day,” not to mention substantial passages from the gospels. For the gospels are the god-spel, the good news or good account, Old English’s equivalent of the Greek to Latin evangelium, good tidings. And for our purposes this week, the good tidings are a call by God for man to turn, because God himself has turned his face toward man in the most remarkable way. The Word has been made flesh, and dwells among us.

What the author Bax believed about Christ, I can’t say. Mark him down as one of those Englishmen with a taste for religion and some kind of longing for God, or at least with a hope that man will finally heed the voice of God within him, and then all things shall be well. Of course, the image of turning is crucial throughout Scripture, as Bax knew very well, simply because everybody knew it. “Return unto thy rest, O my soul,” says the Psalmist, “for the Lord has dealt bountifully with thee.” “Come, and let us return unto the Lord,” says the prophet Hosea, for he alone can heal us. “Turn us, O God of our salvation,” we may well pray, because we do want to turn, and God has the power to make it happen. Bax would have done better, I think, to remember that.

In any case, I admire the poem as a poem, because the form fits the meaning very nicely. That is, there’s a turn in each stanza. The final line repeats the first line, but in a different context, so that you do and you do not end where you began. It’s as if you make the moral and religious turn, which is a turning back, a return, but not by way of rolling back the years, which is impossible. Man redeemed is perhaps a more exalted being than Adam was before he ate the forbidden fruit. I say “perhaps” — about such things, I’ll say with the psalmist, they are too high for me. But the poem works — and I myself have composed a hymn to Old 124th, with Bax’s clever trick of turning the final line back to the first; and I’ve gone farther than that, with the last stanza reprising lines from each of the first four stanzas, and the final line of all echoing the first line of all. That’s for another day, though.