Lyrics
There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign;
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.
There everlasting spring abides,
And never withering flowers:
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This heav'nly land from ours.
Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
Stand dressed in living green:
So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.
But timorous mortals start and shrink
To cross this narrow sea;
And linger, shivering on the brink,
And fear to launch away.
O! Could we make our doubts remove,
Those gloomy thoughts that rise,
And see the Canaan that we love
With unbeclouded eyes!
Could we but climb where Moses stood,
And view the landscape o'er,
Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
Should fright us from the shore.
Public domain hymn text (1707), based on Deuteronomy 34:1.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Isaac Watts published "There Is a Land of Pure Delight" in his 1707 Hymns and Sacred Songs, in the same landmark collection that also introduced "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." Watts, whose precocious gifts as a child included studying Latin at age four and writing respectable verse by seven, went on to be remembered as the father of the English hymn, having largely invented the form as it came to be practiced in evangelical worship.
Tradition holds that the hymn's imagery came to Watts while he sat gazing across Southampton Water, the estuary near his hometown, with the pleasant fields of Netley visible on the far shore suggesting the "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood" of the text. Biographers who have examined the hymn's polish and maturity conclude it could not have been an early or hastily written work, and note that it was likely composed during a season when Watts, often in poor health, was confined and in some pain — making its vision of a land beyond suffering more than an abstract exercise.
The nineteenth-century preacher T. DeWitt Talmage recorded a story that captures the hymn's emotional weight in congregational use: after giving out the hymn in church one Sunday, an elderly man in the front pew sang the first verse heartily and then sat down in tears. Asked afterward what had moved him, the man answered simply that he could not bear to think of the joys that were coming.
The hymn's central image — the Jordan River as the narrow sea dividing this life from the promised land beyond — borrows directly from Israel's crossing into Canaan, with Watts casting the fear of death not as a fear of the unknown but as a hesitation at a shoreline whose far side is, in fact, already visible to faith.
