Work, for the night is coming,
Work through the morning hours;
Work while the dew is sparkling,
Work 'mid springing flowers.
Work, for the night is coming,
Work through the sunny noon;
Fill brightest hours with labor,
Rest comes sure and soon.
Work, for the night is coming,
Work till the last beam fadeth,
Fadeth to shine no more;
Work while the night is dark’ning,
When man’s work is o’er.
Public domain hymn text (published 1854). Words by Annie L. Coghill.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Annie Coghill was a Canadian-born writer who later relocated permanently to England, where she spent most of her adult working life, and she wrote the words to this hymn in 1854 while still quite a young woman, basing its central urgent exhortation directly on John 9:4, in which Jesus states plainly to His disciples, 'I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work' — words originally spoken by Jesus in the specific context of healing a man born blind, but which Coghill lifted out to apply more broadly to the whole of a Christian's active working life and ministry.
The hymn deliberately treats the daylight hours of an individual person's entire earthly life as a genuinely limited, urgently time-bound window for meaningful, active Christian service, using the completely ordinary, universally shared human experience of an everyday workday gradually ending at nightfall as an extended metaphor for mortality itself — functioning as a communally sung reminder, repeated week after week in congregational worship, that concrete opportunities to do good, serve others, and actively share one's faith do not remain available indefinitely, and will eventually and inevitably come to a close for every individual singer just as surely as every ordinary workday eventually ends at sunset.
Lowell Mason, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for tunes including 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' (hymn 4) and 'Joy to the World' (hymn 32), and widely considered one of the single most influential American church musicians of the entire nineteenth century as well as a genuine pioneer of formal music education within American public schools, composed the specific tune that has remained paired with Coghill's words ever since its original publication.
Mason's considerable, direct personal involvement in establishing formal music education programs within American public schools during this same general period helped this hymn, along with a number of his other tune compositions, spread unusually widely and quickly through the specific combination of Sunday school programs and public school singing classes that Mason himself was directly and personally instrumental in establishing and promoting across the United States during his long, influential career as an American music educator.
