Wake, awake, for night is flying,
The watchmen on the heights are crying,
Awake, Jerusalem, arise!
Midnight hears the welcome voices,
And at the thrilling cry rejoices:
Come forth, ye virgins, night is past!
The Bridegroom comes, awake,
Your lamps with gladness take;
Alleluia!
With bridal care yourselves prepare
To meet the Bridegroom, who is near.
Zion hears the watchmen singing,
Her heart with joyful hope is springing,
She wakes, she rises from her gloom;
For her Lord comes down all-glorious,
The strong in grace, in truth victorious,
Her Star is risen, her light is come!
Ah come, Thou blessed Lord,
O Jesus, Son of God,
Alleluia!
We follow all and heed Thy call
To come into the banquet hall.
Now let all the heavens adore Thee,
Let saints and angels sing before Thee,
With harp and cymbal’s clearest tone.
Of one pearl each shining portal,
Where we are with the choir immortal
Of angels round Thy dazzling throne.
Nor eye hath seen, nor ear
Hath yet attained to hear
What there is ours;
But we rejoice, and sing to Thee
Our hymn of joy eternally.
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 (1599). Words by Philipp Nicolai.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Philipp Nicolai was a German Lutheran pastor who wrote both the words and music of this hymn in 1599 while serving the town of Unna in Westphalia during a catastrophic plague epidemic that killed a substantial portion of the town's population within a single year — Nicolai himself reportedly buried more than 1,300 of his own parishioners during that outbreak, at times conducting as many as thirty funerals in a single day, a scale of communal death and grief echoing, within this same collection, the experience of Martin Rinkart during the Thirty Years' War described in connection with 'Now Thank We All Our God' (hymn 50).
Nicolai wrote this hymn together with its companion hymn, 'How Bright Appears the Morning Star,' during this same plague period, publishing both as an appendix to a book of devotional meditations he specifically prepared to comfort his own grieving, dying congregation, work he described in his book's preface as written while surrounded constantly by death, in a house directly overlooking a graveyard that was, in his own words, rarely empty of fresh burials.
The hymn draws its central image from Jesus's parable of the ten virgins awaiting a bridegroom's arrival in Matthew 25, using the parable's urgent call to stay watchful and prepared as a direct pastoral message to a congregation for whom sudden, unexpected death had become, during the plague, an entirely realistic daily possibility rather than an abstract future concern.
Catherine Winkworth, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as translator of 'Praise to the Lord, the Almighty' (hymn 28), translated Nicolai's German text into English considerably later, in the nineteenth century, and the hymn remains, in both its original German and its English translation, one of the most significant and widely sung hymns of the entire Lutheran chorale tradition, its urgent watchfulness born directly out of Nicolai's own firsthand experience of a devastating plague year.
