Lyrics
Sowing the seed by the daylight fair,
Sowing the seed by the noonday glare,
Sowing the seed by the fading light,
Sowing the seed in the solemn night:
O what shall the harvest be?
Sown in the darkness or sown in the light,
Sown in our weakness or sown in our might,
Gathered in time or eternity,
Sure, ah, sure will the harvest be.
Sowing the seed by the wayside high,
Sowing the seed on the rocks to die,
Sowing the seed where the thorns will spoil,
Sowing the seed in the fertile soil:
O what shall the harvest be?
Sowing the seed with an aching heart,
Sowing the seed while the tear-drops start,
Sowing in hope, till the reapers come,
Gladly to gather the harvest home:
O what shall the harvest be?
Public domain hymn text (1850). Words by Emily S. Oakey; music by P. P. Bliss.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Emily S. Oakey, a nineteenth-century American writer and teacher, wrote 'Sowing the Seed of the Kingdom' drawing on the agricultural imagery that ran throughout much of Jesus's own teaching, particularly the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, which pictures the reception of God's word in terms of seed falling on different kinds of soil.
Rather than focusing on how the seed is received, Oakey's hymn shifts attention to the sower's own responsibility, treating every action across an ordinary day, morning, noon, evening, and night, as a seed being planted whether the sower is paying attention to it or not.
Its central refrain poses a genuinely open question, 'oh, what shall the harvest be,' rather than answering it immediately, letting the hymn function partly as self-examination rather than only as settled doctrine.
The hymn's second verse draws the parable's own soil imagery directly into the refrain's question, picturing seed sown 'by the wayside high,' 'on the rocks to die,' among thorns that 'will spoil,' and in 'fertile soil,' a near-paraphrase of the four soils in Jesus's parable that makes the hymn's harvest question inseparable from where, not just how, the seed falls.
Its third verse turns more personal and sober, sowing 'with an aching heart' and 'while the tear-drops start,' before resolving into patient hope, 'sowing in hope, till the reapers come,' acknowledging that faithful effort is often accompanied by real grief rather than only comfortable confidence.
Its agricultural metaphor, drawn from a way of life still central to most nineteenth-century American communities, gave the hymn's abstract point about consequence and character an immediately familiar, physical shape: everyone singing it understood, from direct experience, that a harvest reflects exactly what was planted.
The hymn found a lasting home in Sunday school and youth hymnals, valued for combining an accessible, repeatable refrain with a genuinely serious call to notice the cumulative weight of ordinary daily choices.
