Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel;
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.
Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot cure.”
Here see the Bread of Life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above;
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but Heaven can remove.
Public domain hymn text (1816). Words by Thomas Moore.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Thomas Moore was an Irish poet, best known during his own lifetime for secular romantic and patriotic verse rather than for hymn writing, including a body of popular Irish songs that made him one of the most celebrated poets in the English-speaking world during the early nineteenth century, a reputation built almost entirely apart from any religious writing.
He wrote this hymn's original text in 1816, and the American composer and hymnal editor Thomas Hastings substantially revised and expanded Moore's original three-verse text in 1831, adding additional material and reworking portions of the language, meaning the hymn commonly sung today represents a collaborative text shaped by two different writers working some fifteen years apart rather than a single author's unaltered original composition.
The hymn's repeated refrain, insisting that 'earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal,' offered a direct, unqualified promise of comfort without attaching any specific condition or qualification to that promise, a notably confident and unrestricted claim compared to hymns that more carefully specify particular circumstances under which comfort might be found.
Samuel Webbe, an English composer, wrote the tune commonly associated with the hymn, and the completed work — built from Moore's original secular-poet's verse reworked by Hastings into explicitly devotional language — became a standard hymn specifically associated with services of comfort and consolation, valued by generations of grieving congregations for its directness in naming genuine sorrow and anguish rather than skirting around difficult emotion with more indirect or euphemistic language.
