Aye moi psycha

"Aye moi psycha" is the opening Greek line of the third Ode written by Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais (c. 375–430). Standing as the longest of his ten sacred odes, this impassioned and patriotic composition was written to his own beloved Libya during a period of peace following his return from the court of Emperor Arcadius.

The full Greek text was edited and published in Christ and Paranikas's Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum (1871). The text entered nineteenth-century English literary and hymnological study through three distinct translations:

1. "Lift up thyself my soul": Translated by Allen William Chatfield and published in his Songs and Hymns of the Earliest Greek Christian Poets (1876, pp. 19–55) across seventy-two eight-line stanzas. In a explanatory note regarding his choice of meter, Chatfield noted that while the short, varied metrics of the original Greek prevent monotony through the interchange of anapests, dactyls, and spondees, such metric shifting is impossible in English. Consequently, he adopted the meter used by John Milton in his On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. Chatfield also marked the original line numbers above each stanza for reference. Hymnologists noted that while this translation offered little material for standard congregational hymnals, it provided exquisite text for sacred musical settings.

2. "Come, my soul, to sacred songs": Translated by Alan Stevenson in his Ten Hymns of Synesius, Bp. of Ptolemais, Prolegomena and Notes (1865), though it was deemed unsuited for public congregational worship.

3. Boyd's Partial Translation: A partial translation was produced by Hugh Stuart Boyd and included in his Select Poems of Synesius and Gregory Nazianzen (1814).