105. All Creatures of Our God and King

The Story Behind the Hymn

This hymn's text is based directly on the 'Canticle of the Sun,' a poem originally composed around 1225 by Francis of Assisi, the Italian friar and founder of the Franciscan religious order, a work generally understood by scholars to be among the very earliest surviving pieces of literature written in the Italian vernacular language rather than in the formal Latin still dominant in written literature of that same historical period.

Francis reportedly composed the original canticle near the very end of his own life, while in seriously declining health and partially blind, as a sustained, extended expression of praise addressed directly to God specifically through the surrounding natural world — the sun, the moon, the wind, and even death itself are each individually and directly addressed throughout the poem as a personal 'brother' or 'sister,' an unusually intimate and personal way of relating to the natural world for religious poetry of its historical period.

William Draper, an English clergyman working many centuries later, freely translated and creatively adapted Francis's original medieval Italian text into the English-language hymn now commonly sung in churches today, publishing his own English version in 1919, nearly seven full centuries after Francis had originally composed the underlying canticle — making the hymn's own original underlying text, considered simply on its own terms, one of the single oldest pieces of source material represented anywhere within this entire hymnal collection, considerably predating even the oldest of the various Reformation-era hymns found elsewhere throughout this same collection.