Abide with Me

The story

"Abide with Me" is a Christian hymn by the Anglican cleric Henry Francis Lyte (1793–1847). Lyte was a curate in County Wexford from 1815 to 1818, where he often preached at the church in Killurin and came under the lasting influence of its rector, the Reverend Abraham Swanne; he was later vicar of All Saints' Church in Brixham, Devon. In poor health for most of his life, he travelled abroad for relief, as was usual at the time. The hymn takes its starting point from Luke 24:29, where the disciples ask Jesus to abide with them "for it is toward evening and the day is far spent".

The date of the text is disputed. An article in The Spectator of 3 October 1925 said that Lyte wrote it in 1820, while staying with the Hore family in County Wexford, after sitting with a dying friend, William Augustus Le Hunte, who kept repeating the words "abide with me"; on this account Lyte recalled those lines twenty-seven years later, when he was dying of tuberculosis. The usual date is 1847. His daughter, Anna Maria Maxwell Hogg, told how in September of that year, against his family's fears, he preached once more to his people, and that evening gave a near relative the little hymn with an air of his own composing. Lyte died weeks later, on 20 November 1847, in Nice, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the hymn was first sung at his funeral.

The tune most often sung is not Lyte's but "Eventide", written in 1861 by the English organist William Henry Monk, the first editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern; one edition of that hymnal left out a verse about the singer's youth as too personal. Other tunes followed, among them Samuel Liddle's setting of 1896, the one Dame Clara Butt favoured. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a descant for the hymnal Songs of Praise (1925) and an orchestral prelude on Eventide for the Hereford Festival of 1936, and Charles Ives set the hymn around 1890.

The hymn is sung in many Christian denominations, and King George V and Mahatma Gandhi were said to hold it a favourite. It is often sung at funerals: those of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, of George V in 1936, of Queen Mary in 1953, of Jean, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, in 2019 and of Harald V of Norway in 2026. It was sung at the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey in 1920, and is sometimes sung on Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand and on Remembrance Day in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Its first and last verses are sung at the FA Cup Final about 15 minutes before kick-off. The custom may go back to the 1923 final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United, when the event choir sang it while crowds were cleared from the pitch; its first formal use was at the 1927 final between Arsenal and Cardiff City, and it has been sung before every Rugby League Challenge Cup Final since 1929. Emeli Sandé sang it at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, in tribute to the victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Thelonious Monk recorded an arrangement in 1957, and in 2019 the programme Songs of Praise named it the fifth most popular hymn among British Christians.

What it says

A prayer that God stay with the one who prays as evening falls, through the trials of life and at the hour of death, taking its first words from the disciples' plea to Jesus in Luke 24:29. Near its close it takes up the challenge to death and the grave of 1 Corinthians 15:55. The mood is quiet, solemn and trusting.

The words