True Ownership
All lovely things belong to me.
The sun is shining on the sea,
The wind is whispering to the tree,
The lark is singing in the sky,
The fleecy clouds are sailing by;
I am as rich as I can be,
For all these things belong to me.
No one can take these joys away,
For in my heart they ever stay.
— Anonymous
Note from the WorshipWeb team:
As far as we have been able to determine, this little poem first appeared in print in the early 1920s: once on page 17 of the November 3, 1921 edition of The Christian Register, and once on page 190 of Lucy Wheelock’s Talks to Mothers (Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, printed 1922 but copyright 1920). The poem is unattributed in both locations.
However, in the UUA hymnal Singing the Living Tradition, a very similar text occurs as the lyrics to the first verse of #19, “The Sun That Shines,” with the annotation “attrib. to Dimitri S. Bortniansky, 1751–1825”:
The Sun That Shines
The sun that shines across the sea,
The wind that whispers in the tree,
The lark that carols in the sky,
The fleecy clouds a-sailing by,
O, I’m as rich as rich can be,
For all these things belong to me!
We believe that the attribution to Bortniansky is incorrect, and was the result of a misunderstanding by an editor of Singing the Living Tradition. The best attribution for this poem is to “anonymous.” Let us explain how we have come to this conclusion…
Bortniansky was a Russian composer of Ukrainian origin, important in the history of both Russian and Ukrainian classical music. A number of his melodies are the basis for hymn tunes, the most popular being ST. PETERSBURG and VESPER HYMN.
The hymnal Children Praising (Oxford University Press, 1937; music edited by Herbert Wiseman, words edited by W. H. Hamilton) sets the words of the poem above to Bortiansky’s tune ST. PETERSBURG. Here is a partially-redacted image of page 51 from that hymnal, showing hymns #71 and #72, with some relevant portions circled in red:
This hymnal indicates the attribution of words and music in a slightly unusual way. The origin of the music of each hymn is indicated by giving the name of the hymn tune at the upper left of the score, and by giving the name of the composer or the source of the tune at the upper right of the score. (See the red boxes at the top of each score in the image.) The attribution of the lyrics is given by listing the name of the author, if known, at the bottom right of the score. See, for example, the red box below hymn #72 in the image above, which has words by Laura E. Richards.
For hymn #71, whose lyrics are an anonymously-written poem, there is no name listed on the lower right; an empty red box shows where the lyricist’s name would go if one were known. We believe that one of the editors of Singing the Living Tradition saw hymn #71 from Children Praising and misunderstood the meanings of the annotations, thinking perhaps that the music was being identified solely through the upper left annotation, and that the lyricist was being identified by the upper right annotation. We believe that this misunderstanding led to the misattribution of the first verse of “The Sun That Shines.”
Rev. Mark Belletini, one of the members of the editorial board of Singing the Living Tradition, agrees that this is likely the explanation for the misattribution of these words to Bortniansky.
Amusingly, the story of the appearance of “The Sun That Shines” in Singing the Living Tradition loops back to Unitarian Universalism: The Christian Register, the publication with one of the two earliest appearances of the poem “True Ownership,” has changed its name and merged with other publications over the years. But it is still being published, twice yearly… now under the name UU World.