One of the hymns in church on Sunday was "Long before the World Is Waking" (the text is drawn from John 21:1-17, which was one of the readings). I noticed a few small features.
The first is purely about the text. The third and fourth lines of the fourth verse are: "Fear and failure, doubt, denying, / Full and free forgiveness find." The alliteration of "Full and free forgiveness find" helps to give a sense of the all-encompassing nature of that forgiveness.
The other things I noticed deal with the fifth and sixth musical phrases (the tune is "All Saints"):
In the fourth verse, the text here is "All the soul's dark night is past, / Morning breaks in joy at last" (which I believe is taken from Psalm 30:5). "Breaks" is sung with a melisma (G A), so while it's used in a more metaphorical sense, there's a musical "break[ing]" of the word into more than one pitch.
In the fifth verse, the text is "All our days, on ev'ry shore, / Christ is ours forevermore!" "Ev'ry" is sung with a melisma here (D C Bb), and that extra syllable gives a sense of number.