Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Thy daily stage of duty run;
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
To pay thy morning sacrifice.
Wake, and lift up thyself, my heart,
And with the angels bear thy part,
Who all night long unwearied sing
High praise to the eternal King.
Direct, control, suggest, this day,
All I design, or do, or say,
That all my powers, with all their might,
In Thy sole glory may unite.
Public domain hymn text (1674). Words by Thomas Ken.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Thomas Ken, an English bishop who served briefly as a personal chaplain to King Charles II before later becoming Bishop of Bath and Wells, wrote this hymn's text in 1674 as part of a small, originally private manual of daily prayers he had first prepared specifically for the students under his care at Winchester College, where he had earlier served for a period as schoolmaster. Ken specifically intended this particular hymn to function as a morning prayer meant to be sung immediately upon waking each day, forming one half of a matched pair of morning and evening hymns he had originally written together for exactly this same daily devotional purpose.
Ken later lost his own bishopric entirely after refusing, purely as a matter of personal conscience and principle, to swear a fresh loyalty oath to the new monarch William III following the sudden overthrow of King James II in 1688, becoming, alongside a small handful of similarly principled fellow clergy, one of a distinct group of English churchmen who became known collectively as 'non-jurors,' men who chose to accept the complete loss of their official positions and livelihoods entirely rather than compromise on an earlier oath of loyalty they had previously sworn to the now-deposed King James.
That costly, deliberately chosen personal stand for conscience ultimately outlasted Ken's own comparatively brief period of active royal and episcopal service by several further decades of quiet, largely unofficial retirement, during which period this particular hymn — together with its matching companion evening hymn, from which the now widely familiar standalone doxology 'Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow' (hymn 19 elsewhere in this same collection) was itself eventually drawn and separated out — continued nonetheless to steadily spread in popularity across a wide range of English-speaking Protestant worship traditions, entirely independent of Ken's own personal political fortunes and eventual loss of formal ecclesiastical office.
