Come, ye thankful people, come,
Raise the song of harvest home;
All is safely gathered in,
Ere the winter storms begin.
God, our Maker, doth provide
For our wants to be supplied;
Come to God's own temple, come,
Raise the song of harvest home.
All the world is God's own field,
Fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown,
Unto joy or sorrow grown.
First the blade, and then the ear,
Then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we
Wholesome grain and pure may be.
For the Lord our God shall come,
And shall take His harvest home;
From His field shall in that day
All offenses purge away,
Give His angels charge at last
In the fire the tares to cast,
But the fruitful ears to store
In His garner evermore.
Even so, Lord, quickly come
To Thy final harvest home;
Gather Thou Thy people in,
Free from sorrow, free from sin,
There, forever purified,
In Thy garner to abide;
Come, with all Thine angels, come,
Raise the glorious harvest home.
Public domain hymn text (published 1844). Words by Henry Alford.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Henry Alford was an English clergyman, respected biblical scholar, and accomplished hymn writer who eventually rose to become Dean of Canterbury Cathedral in 1857, one of the most senior and historically significant positions within the entire Church of England, following a long and academically distinguished earlier career that also included years of painstaking scholarly work producing a major, widely respected critical edition of the Greek New Testament, a four-volume work considered a genuine landmark of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship among specialists in the field, alongside his more popularly known hymn writing.
He wrote this harvest hymn in 1844, drawing its central structure and imagery directly from Jesus's parable of the wheat and the tares found in Matthew 13, in which good grain and worthless weeds are described as growing together, indistinguishable, in the very same field until an appointed final harvest at last separates one from the other — Alford deliberately using the entirely familiar, concrete, lived experience of an actual agricultural harvest, something every member of his rural nineteenth-century congregation would have understood firsthand, as a vivid and accessible occasion for reflecting on the far more abstract theological themes of final judgment and the ultimate ingathering of souls at the end of the age.
Written specifically for use at English harvest festival services, a well-established traditional autumn observance held in rural parish churches across England each year to formally thank God for that particular year's crops — a practice with roots extending back centuries into English agricultural and religious life, often involving the physical decoration of the church building itself with sheaves of wheat, fruit, and vegetables brought directly from local fields and gardens — the hymn nonetheless spread considerably beyond its original specific rural English context.
It remains today a regular fixture of harvest-themed and Thanksgiving-themed worship services across many different countries, denominations, and cultural contexts far removed from the specific nineteenth-century English rural parish life Alford originally had in mind when he first sat down to pair the practical rhythms of an actual grain harvest with the far larger and more permanent harvest of souls his hymn ultimately points toward.
