Lyrics
I'll praise my Maker while I've breath,
And when my voice is lost in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers;
My days of praise shall ne'er be past,
While life and thought and being last,
Or immortality endures.
Why should I make a man my trust?
Princes must die and turn to dust;
Vain is the help of flesh and blood:
Their breath departs, their pomp and power,
And thoughts all vanish in an hour,
Nor can they make their promise good.
How happy they whose hopes rely
On Israel's God, who made the sky
And earth and seas, with all their train:
His truth forever stands secure;
He saves th' oppressed, He feeds the poor,
And none shall find His promise vain.
The Lord gives eyesight to the blind;
The Lord supports the sinking mind;
He sends the laboring conscience peace;
He helps the stranger in distress,
The widow, and the fatherless,
And grants the prisoner sweet release.
He loves His saints, He knows them well,
But turns the wicked down to hell;
Thy God, O Zion, ever reigns:
Let every tongue, let every age,
In this exalted work engage;
Praise Him in everlasting strains.
I'll praise Him while He lends me breath;
And when my voice is lost in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers;
My days of praise shall ne'er be past,
While life and thought and being last,
Or immortality endures.
Public domain hymn text (1719). Words by Isaac Watts, from Psalm 146. Full 6-stanza text.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Isaac Watts published 'I'll Praise My Maker While I've Breath' in his 1719 collection The Psalms of David Imitated, paraphrasing Psalm 146, which opens, 'Praise ye the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. While I live will I praise the Lord: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being.'
Watts's opening line commits to praise not merely for the remainder of an ordinary lifetime but explicitly beyond it, insisting that praise will continue 'when my voice is lost in death,' extending the psalm's own lifelong commitment into a claim about the eternal state as well.
The hymn's second verse shifts from personal commitment to a broader description of the God being praised, listing His care for 'the oppressed' and the poor, closely following the psalm's own catalog of God's practical concern for the vulnerable rather than staying only in the register of abstract praise.
The English poet William Cowper, who suffered from severe depression and religious anxiety throughout much of his life, was reportedly deeply moved by this hymn, and tradition holds that its closing lines were among the last words read to him as he lay dying in 1800.
That association gave the hymn particular resonance in later English hymnody as a text specifically suited to the deathbed and to funerals, its declaration that praise continues past the point where 'voice is lost' offering comfort precisely at the moment such comfort was most needed.
Watts wrote this hymn as part of his larger, systematic project of setting the entire Psalter into explicitly Christian congregational verse, an effort that fundamentally reshaped English-language hymn singing away from strict, literal psalm-only practice.
The hymn remained a standard text in English and American hymnals for centuries, valued for the way its opening commitment, so simply and confidently extending praise past the boundary of death itself, gave congregations direct, singable language for facing mortality with continued hope.
