Life & Wisdom Quote by Fanny Crosby

A lyric like "Chords that were broken will vibrate once more" works because it refuses the tidy language of "healing" and chooses sound instead: the body as instrument, grief as damage, hope as resonance. Crosby doesn’t promise that the strings will be replaced or that the song will return unchanged. She imagines repair as re-animation. Something snapped can still carry tone again, which is a subtler, more believable optimism than the usual Victorian moral polish.

The line lands with extra force in Crosby’s context: a 19th-century poet and hymn-writer who lived most of her life blind, writing for an America addicted to revival meetings, parlor piety, and the emotional engineering of gospel music. Hymns were designed to move through a crowd like electricity, turning private suffering into shared cadence. In that world, “broken chords” aren’t just personal heartbreak; they’re spiritual estrangement, family rupture, social dislocation in an era of war, industrial churn, and premature death. The verb “vibrate” feels almost scientific, a nod to the physical reality of sound: you don’t will a chord into existence, you strike it, and it responds.

Subtextually, Crosby offers a theology of continuity. The self that was damaged is still there, still capable of response. The image also flatters the listener’s endurance: if you can still be made to vibrate, you were never fully silenced. It’s consolation that keeps its grit, letting brokenness remain part of the instrument rather than a shameful flaw to be erased.