Sun of my soul, Thou Savior dear,
It is not night if Thou be near;
O may no earth-born cloud arise
To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes.
When the soft dews of kindly sleep
My wearied eyelids gently steep,
Be my last thought, how sweet to rest
Forever on my Savior’s breast.
Be near to bless me when I wake,
Ere through the world my way I take;
Abide with me till in Thy love
I lose myself in heaven above.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1820). Words by John Keble.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Keble, an English clergyman and poet closely associated throughout his career with the Oxford Movement — the very same nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that later led John Henry Newman all the way to Rome (see hymn 99 elsewhere in this collection) — wrote this hymn's text in 1820 as part of a considerably larger collection of poems titled 'The Christian Year,' a work deliberately organized around the successive seasons and observances of the traditional church calendar and originally intended primarily for private daily devotional reading at home rather than for congregational singing in church.
The book became genuinely and remarkably popular across England following its publication, going through dozens of separate printed editions during Keble's own lifetime alone, and this particular poem, originally composed specifically as a quiet evening reflection intended for private reading, was only later extracted from the much larger original collection and separately set to hymn tunes for congregational use, a common pattern for several of Keble's individual poems from within the same larger book.
Keble spent the great majority of his own working career serving simply as an ordinary parish clergyman in rural England, deliberately and repeatedly declining opportunities for higher ecclesiastical advancement and office despite his considerable and widely recognized fame as both a published poet and an influential religious writer within the broader Oxford Movement.
Keble College at Oxford University was subsequently founded and formally named directly in his honor several decades after his death, established specifically as a lasting memorial to his considerable and sustained influence on the broader life and theological direction of the Church of England during the nineteenth century, a rare case of an English college being named for a man who had spent most of his own actual working life quietly serving a single small rural parish rather than pursuing any higher position within the church hierarchy itself.
