I was well into my twenties before I finally deciphered one particular line from I Need Thee Every Hour. It was a line that I had certainly sung a hundred times or more: “No tender voice like thine can peace afford.” I had wondered offhand about its meaning several times, typically in mid-hymn. Every time, the question evaporated within minutes and remained unanswered, only to pop up again a few months later.
As I sat during one particularly boring sacrament meeting, immediately after singing the hymn, I set out to decipher that line. By then I was in law school, as I recall, and getting used to unwinding convoluted sentences. And so I analyzed the line, and came up with this:
First, afford is used in the sense of give. Give to someone else. (It’s meaning number four on the list at Dictionary.com: To furnish or supply, as in, The transaction afforded him a good profit.)
Second, peace and afford are reversed, for rhyming purposes. Untwist those for easier reading, and we get “no tender voice like thine can furnish peace.”
Continuing to unwind the line, we can take the clause “like thine” (which is set in a potentially confusing spot) and move it to the end of the sentence for clarity. Also, note that “like” is used in the sense of “as much as” or “as well as” rather than “similar to.”
And putting together all of those clarifications, we arrive at:
No [other] tender voice furnishes peace [to me] quite as well as yours does. That, as far as I can determine, is the unwound meaning of “no tender voice like thine can peace afford.”
I suspect that other readers wonder from time to time about some of our confusing, convoluted hymn texts. What other hymn texts make you scratch your head every time you sing them? (I recently wondered what on earth “grace shall be as your day” means; so far, no easy explanation seems evident.) If you’ve ever wondered about a particular line, please let us know that line in the comments. And if you’ve got an idea of the answer to another’s question, feel free to suggest an explanation. (If and when we find ourselves completely stumped, we’ll turn to Rosalynde, Kristine, and/or Mark B. (Brooklyn edition) for further enlightenment and clarification.)