Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying

Philip Nicolai, 1599; translated by Catherine Winkworth

The year is 1598, and the time is early morning. A middle-aged minister in the Westphalian town of Unna is sitting at his desk, praying, with a pen in his hand. He is a poet, a theologian, and a musical composer all in one, rare even for that time, unheard of in ours. The plague has been through Unna — actually, since 1348, the plague had settled down in Europe for a five-hundred-year stay, periodically flaring up in virulence. So it did in Unna that year, and the minister, Philipp Nicolai, had been called upon to preside at many a funeral, and to bury many a friend. One of these was his student, a mere boy, the young Duke of Waldeck. In all his sadness, Nicolai gave himself up to the love of God, for whom he longed most fervently, writing that if God had given him everything that any human soul would desire, but not Himself, it would be nothing at all. Filled with the peace of confident expectation, he began to compose a hymn in his mind, and then to write it down, and so rapt was he…