Watchman, tell us of the night,
What its signs of promise are.
Traveler, o’er yon mountain’s height,
See that glory-beaming star!
Watchman, does its beauteous ray
Aught of joy or hope foretell?
Traveler, yes; it brings the day,
Promised day of Israel.
Watchman, tell us of the night;
Higher yet that star ascends.
Traveler, blessedness and light,
Peace and truth its course portends.
Watchman, will its beams alone
Gild the spot that gave them birth?
Traveler, ages are its own;
See, it bursts o’er all the earth.
Watchman, tell us of the night,
For the morning seems to dawn.
Traveler, darkness takes its flight,
Doubt and terror are withdrawn.
Watchman, let thy wanderings cease;
Hie thee to thy quiet home.
Traveler, lo! the Prince of Peace,
Lo! the Son of God is come!
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 (1825). Words by John Bowring.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Bowring, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the British diplomat, linguist, and eventual governor of Hong Kong who also wrote 'In the Cross of Christ I Glory' (hymn 79), wrote this hymn's text in 1825, drawing its distinctive dialogue structure directly from Isaiah 21:11-12, in which a traveler asks a city watchman, 'Watchman, what of the night?' and receives an ambiguous, only partially reassuring answer — 'the morning cometh, and also the night.'
Bowring built his entire hymn around this call-and-response structure between an anxious traveler seeking reassurance and a watchman offering it, an unusual dialogue format for a hymn that requires either alternating solo voices or, in congregational use, alternating sections of the congregation to sing the two distinct parts, giving it a more dramatic, theatrical quality than most single-voice devotional hymns.
The hymn's underlying question — whether there is genuine cause for hope amid ongoing darkness — reflects a theme Bowring returned to more than once in his hymn writing, and the watchman's answer, that the promised light will eventually 'burst o'er all the earth' rather than remaining confined to 'the spot that gave them birth,' extends the specific messianic hope of ancient Israel described in Isaiah into a universal hope Bowring understood as belonging to the entire world.
Given Bowring's own considerable personal experience as a linguist and diplomat working across an unusually wide range of different cultures and nations over his career, this hymn's insistence that the promised light belongs to 'all the earth' rather than remaining confined to any single nation or people carries a particular resonance drawn from Bowring's own genuinely international working life, spent moving between very different cultures and political contexts across Europe and Asia.
