“May Jesus Christ be praised!” This should be our prayer every day as we awaken, the desire of our hearts that in this and every day, we would think and act and live in such a way that Jesus Christ would be praised. That’s at the center of the hymn “When Morning Gilds the Skies.” We sing that request twelve times in the six stanzas found in most hymnals today. And if your hymnal includes more of the 14 stanzas available, you will sing that phrase 28 times!
The hymn is based on an anonymous German hymn from the 18th century. “Beim frühen Morgenlicht” (“With the early morning light”) is the opening line of the original German hymn. While we are uncertain of the exact origins of the text, it first appeared in “Catholic Songbook for Public Worship in the [locale of] Biszthume, Würzburg.” It appears in an altered version in an 1855 Franconian collection of folksongs, “Frankische Völkslieder.” Our English versions are not so much a literal translation of the original as they are a new poetic creation based on themes from the original.