When I arrived at Tennessee Wesleyan University, I was pleased to hear that the Alma Mater tune I heard at my first summer commencement used a gorgeous tune called Hyfrydol (a Welsh word, pronounced “huh-VRUH-doll,” meaning “lovely”). Folks who sing hymns regularly know this tune as “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” “God the Spirit, Guide and Guardian,” “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus!” and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”

In 2016, Tennessee Wesleyan College became Tennessee Wesleyan University. This name change rendered the previous Alma Mater useless, since it had a rhyme on the “C” of “T. W. C.”

Our strong band can ne’er be broken
Formed at T. W. C.
Far surpassing wealth unspoken
Sealed by loyalty.

Refrain
Lift the chorus, speed it onward,
Loud her praises be;
Hail to thee our Alma Mater!
Hail to T. W. C.

School life here at best is passing,
Fast the moments flee.
Let us pledge in work and deed
Our love for T. W. C.

Refrain

One of the music professors, Keith Wheeler, adapted the old Alma Mater (which was using Cornell’s Alma Mater tune) to conform to the school’s new name, and chose Hyfrydol for its new tune. This single verse served us well for several years, but it always struck me as a bit too short at one verse:

Our strong band can ne’er be broken
formed at Tennessee Wesleyan.
Far surpassing wealth unspoken,
Light and Truth united as one.
Lift the chorus, speed it onward,
let us pledge in word and deed:
Hail to thee, our Alma Mater,
loud her praises ever be.

“Light and Truth” is a reference to our university motto, “Lux et veritas.” He also fixed “work and deed,” which made little sense. The whole second stanza was omitted, since it was a bit depressing. It isn’t as important to remember how fleeting the school days are, I think, but rather to invest in each other and to the program to grow in life, which includes those school days. Life happens wherever you are, after all.

There are some natural challenges with this text, such as having a dactyl “Tennessee” that does not sound natural anywhere you thread it into the tune, other than to speed up the rhythm on just that one word. To write a second verse, I would need to mimic that dactyl in the same spot. The same thing happens at “united as.” Thus the text doesn’t conform exactly to the 8.7.8.7D (eight syllables, seven syllables, eight, seven, double) meter that Hyfrydol typically uses. Instead, it is technically LM (four eight-syllable lines) followed by 8.7.8.7.

So on a lark, I started drafting a second verse to lengthen the song and express more of what goes on at our ceremonies. Here’s what I came up with:

Our best memories live surrounded
By the hackberry and the oak.
May our lives, like them, be grounded,
Deeper roots in Truth we invoke.
Let each spark begin to glimmer,
Every falsehood we will shed;
Let the Light within us shimmer,
Then from mountains will it spread.

So, here, I’ve retained the dactyl with “hackberry” and with “Truth we in-,” so that the two stanzas follow the same pattern. The hackberry and oak are two symbols of the university represented in a legend about star-crossed lovers being buried underneath those two trees. It is also on the seal of the university as two crossed boughs with their respective leaves. So I refer to them as symbols of being deeply stable through anchoring to Truth. The second half deals with something we symbolize each year through our honor code signing ceremony and the commencement ceremony, when we light candles as a faculty and pass them on to the graduates while a song is sung. Mountains obviously refers to our situation within the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.

So here’s the tune:

It has been received well. Hopefully it maintains a sense of idealism to the work done learning the liberal arts.