By Elizabeth Joy Macomber
This hymn was written by Henry F. Lyte, and composed by William H. Monk.
Henry Lyte
Henry Francis Lyte was born in Scotland on June 1, 1793. He was educated at Trinity College, of Dublin, Ireland, and was a member of the Church of England all his life. His health was always threatened by asthma and tuberculosis. Despite his bad health he was a tireless worker with the established reputation as a poet, musician and minister.
For the last twenty-three years of his life, Henry Lyte served as a pastor in a poor church among the fishing people in Lower Brixham, Devonshire, England. Because of failing health, he was forced to move to the warmer climate of Italy, so on September 4, 1847, he preached his final sermon to his congregation. It is recorded that he had to nearly crawl to the pulpit to deliver his last sermon. It is said that just before this last service, he had written the text to this hymn along with his own tune. The text of the song was taken from:
Luke 24:29. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.
On his way to Rome, Italy, Henry Lyte died on November 20, 1847, at Nice, France, and was buried there in an English cemetery.
There were originally eight verses written for this song but we only sing verses one, three and five.
Henry Francis Lyte did not write very many hymns but this one is known and enjoyed all over the world.
“Abide with me” was the last hymn Edith Cavell sang before she was martyred in Belgium, on October 12, 1915, during World War I.
William Monk
The composer of this hymn William Henry Monk was born on March 16, 1823, in London England. William Monk became a singing teacher at King’s College, in 1874. In 1876, he became a teacher at the National Training School of Music. In 1878, he started teaching at Bedford College. He was also a music director for almost four decades at St. Matthias, Stoke Newington, London, and was the first musical editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
William Monk died on March 1, 1889 in London England and is buried in Highgate Cemetary in London.
Monk penned the tune for this hymn in ten minutes. There are at least two versions of when the tune was composed. One version is that this tune was composed at the close of a meeting of the committee compiling Hymns Ancient and Modern, in spite of a piano lesson going on in the next room. The other version is that after the composer’s death, his widow said that her husband wrote this tune “in her company out-of-doors at a time of great sorrow, after they had stood some time watching the glory of the setting sun.”
Sources:
http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/cwalds/voll5_mun6/hymn.html
http://www.lawrence.edu/fac/koopmajo/ives.html
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/m/o/monk_wh.htm
http://villa.lakes.com/irv/hymns/hymn-2.htm
William J. Reynolds Companion to Baptist Hymnal (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1976) Pages 26-27
