“Make Me a Captive, Lord” is an 1890 hymn by Rev. George Matheson of Glasgow, Scotland. The tune was written in 1862 by George William Martin of London.
I’ve copied the words here. This performance skips the third verse.
- Make me a captive, Lord,
And then I shall be free.
Force me to render up my sword
And I shall conqueror be.
I sink in life’s alarms
When by myself I stand;
Imprison me within thine arms,
And strong shall be my hand. - My heart is weak and poor
Until it master find;
It has no spring of action sure,
It varies with the wind.
It cannot freely move
Till thou hast wrought its chain;
Enslave it with thy matchless love,
And deathless it shall reign. - My pow’r is faint and low
Till I have learned to serve;
It lacks the needed fire to glow,
It lacks the breeze to nerve.
It cannot drive the world
Until itself be driv’n;
Its flag can only be unfurled
When thou shalt breathe from heav’n. - My will is not my own
Till thou hast made it thine;
If it would reach a monarch’s throne,
It must its crown resign.
It only stands unbent
Amid the clashing strife
When on thy bosom it has leant,
And found in thee its life.
My favorite hymn. It’s got a sword in it.
Verse 2 is actually using a pocket watch as an illustration. Older designs of pocket watch would run slower as the spring wound down before the owner winds them up again. This is what it means by “it has no spring of action sure, it varies with the wind”. It does not mean “wind” as in the wind which blows in the trees, but the “wind” as in the “winding down” of the watch spring. Many congregations sing this verse using the wrong word thinking it to be about the weather when it is about the watch spring.
I disagree. The spring of action I accept, but I don’t believe there was an idiomatic phrase calling the mechanism of a watch spring “the wind,” and “varies with the wind” is an established figure of speech. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
You make a good point, but there is a second reason why I think the “varies with the wind” refers to a watch spring. In the first verse the final word of lines (“be” and “free”) rhyme. In the verse in question the equivalent two words are “find” and “wind”. The weather borne “wind” does not rhyme with “find”.
Fair enough. But “wind” with a long “i” sounds ugly. Better a near rhyme, in my stubborn view.
Of course, Rev Matheson may have intentionally enjoyed leaving some ambiguity so that he could have two images in his hymn for the price of one.