The King of Love My Shepherd Is

The King of Love My Shepherd Is is an 1868 hymn with lyrics written by Henry Williams Baker, based on the Welsh version of Psalm 23 and the work of Edmund Prys.

It is most often sung to four different melodies:

• "Dominus Regit Me", composed by John Bacchus Dykes, a friend and contemporary of Henry Williams Baker. It first appeared in the 1868 appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern. In 1997 this version was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
• The traditional Irish tune "St. Columba". The tune was first paired with the text in The English Hymnal (1906), harmonised by Charles Villiers Stanford.
• "Remsen", by Rees Thomas, which first appeared in Daniel Prothero's Welsh 1918 hymnbook Cân a Mawl, for the Calvanistic Methodists of North America.
• "Ich dank' dir schon", composed by Michael Praetorius in 1610, as published in The Lutheran Hymnal, No. 431 (1941).

Other choral settings of the text include those by Edward Bairstow (1931), Charles Gounod (1899), Harry Rowe Shelley (1886) and Arthur Somervell (1903). There are many other settings of texts derived from Psalm 23.

Henry Baker's last words were reportedly lyrics from this hymn.

Lyrics

References