Husbandeth – My Word for Today, Tomorrow, and the Day After That

How I needed this word for today: husbandeth. But when I really needed it was yesterday. And, chances are, I’ll need it tomorrow and the day after that.

The word husbandeth occurs only once in all the Bible, and that is in Proverbs 17:27.

The Contemporary English Version has it this way: “It makes a lot of sense to be a person of few words and to stay calm.”

Yesterday the ‘few words and stay calm’ thing didn’t happen.

Let’s just say a disagreement escalated far beyond where it should never have gone, at least more than likely would not have gone had ‘husbandeth’ occurred to me.

A strong word, it is a reference to the rather calm, calculated and controlled composure of a farmer as he goes about - day after day - collecting a harvest of grain.

Poet John Drinkwater uses the word ‘husbandeth’ in a piece he entitled “Death,” published in 1911.

Here is the second stanza:

From out the shadowy ways

Forever comes the noise

Of Death’s wings beating slow

Man hears, and asks in vain

If Death at length destroys

Or leads to golden days

Or shall he ever know

Who husbandeth the grain.

Ironically, Drinkwater, who authored the poem “Death,” would die on March 25, 1937. That was the day after the race between Oxford and Cambridge, a race between the two prestigious universities - which Drinkwater witnessed – in which Oxford beat Cambridge for the first time in 14 years in the annual event on the 4.2 mile Thames River course.

Some news reports attribute Drinkwater’s heart attack and subsequent death to “overexcitement’ at the “close race with changing fortunes.”

Most interesting is that the Oxford rowers won by ‘husbanding’ their emotions.

Approximately half-way though the course, perennial champion Cambridge had taken the lead.

But, unperturbed and undaunted by their dismal record, and unfazed by the three-strokes per minute faster finishing pace of the Cambridge crew, Oxford stayed steady and built a one boat length lead, then two, and then three - leaving Cambridge in its wake in what would be “the narrowest margin of victory since 1877” – sixty years – “a truly magnificent victory for the Oxford crew.”

Husbanding their emotions; adopting a steady-as-she-goes pace; marshalling their energy and effort – won the race on the Thames.

Husbanding grain is a day-after-day, and the day after that, process.

And husbanding our words, opening our mouth only to say something more beautiful than our silence, likewise wins in life, and with those we love.