The lady who versified the "Prayer" from English prose translations of the Old Irish, about 1500 years later, was Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, married to the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland--Patrick's ecclesiastical successor.
She used the phrase that scared me so much as a teenager--"I bind unto myself"--as a motif to begin or end most of the nine stanzas. Confronting my fears, I pulled out a magnifying glass and looked up "bind" in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. I think this definition makes the most sense in this context: "To fasten round, to gird, encircle, wreathe (the head, etc., with something)...." That fits beautifully with the idea of Patrick forging himself a breastplate of prayer. ("Bind" was also used with this meaning in a poem by Tennyson in 1870, about 20 years before Mrs. Alexander picked it up for her own poem, so it may have been a fashionable poetic word.)
But what are we to do about Patrick's binding to himself all sorts of things other than the Trinity, like "the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks"?
A key phrase here is the fourth stanza's opening line, "I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heavens." I remember from philosophy and theology classes that "virtue" is sometimes used to mean "power."
I suspect Patrick saw the glad power of the Creator in all these things. He wasn't worshiping the wind or rocks as gods themselves, nor was he attributing the power within them to some World Consciousness, but to Christ, the god with a name, a face, and a distinct personality who allows other personalities and forms to exist by His own power. (In some ways, Christ is the height of tolerance!) The whole song, especially the eighth stanza, sounds like an interpretation of one of my favorite passages of Scripture, Colossians 1:15-20. Christ's virtue in all things: we in harmony with Christ are restored to harmony with all things.
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