In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress,

And when I my sins confess,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

When I lie within my bed,

Sick in heart and sick in head,

And with doubts discomforted,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

When the house doth sigh and weep,

And the world is drown'd in sleep,

Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

During the English Civil War, Robert Herrick, priest and poet, was ejected from his Devon parish and forced to rely on friends and family until reinstated fifteen years later. Was this what he meant by “the hour of (his) distress”? In these first three verses of his Litany to the Holy Spirit, he certainly describes symptoms consonant with such trauma and turbulence – disturbed thoughts, sickness of heart and mind, doubt, sleeplessness, a feeling that the very house weeps with him in the dead of night. From them all he prays for release: “Sweet Spirit comfort me”.

In our own time, pandemic, climate emergency and a new war in Europe have forced humanity’s mental health high up the global agenda. Herrick’s swirling maelstrom of emotions feels familiar to many. Familiar too the angst we see in Edvard Munch’s iconic 1893 painting. Munch, walking at sunset near Oslo under blood-red clouds, had sensed an "infinite shriek passing through nature". Head held despairingly in hands, the painting’s figure emits a silent (yet somehow reverberating) scream from a gaping mouth.

Munch paints and Herrick writes the ‘Passion of Mental Anguish’, a condition of distressed anxiety belonging to the human condition. But the composer Peter Hurford (1930-2019) takes us beyond this anguish. With his setting of Herrick’s prayer, we find ourselves in a place of calm and consolation, the simple serenity of his composition already ushering in the Spirit’s comfort.