Читать книгу Sisters In Song; Women Hymn Writers - Leslie Clay - Страница 20

1836-1907

“Work, for the Night is Coming”

Annie Walker was one of nine children born in Staffordshire, England, but her family moved to the backwoods of Quebec, Canada in 1853. Later, she moved to Ontario, where she founded a private girls’ school with two of her sisters. She closed it when the sisters died. She returned to England about 1863 and in 1884, married a wealthy widower, merchant Harry Coghill, in Staffordshire. During her life, she was prominent as an author and poet, and published five novels and two poetry collections.

Anna wrote “The Night Cometh” when she was eighteen, after her family had moved to Canada, where she had plenty of work to do. It was first published in a Canadian newspaper and later, in her own book, Leaves from the Back Woods, written anonymously in 1861. Ira Sankey set her poem to music and published it as a hymn, “Work, for the Night is Coming” with no attribution to her. When Anna learned of the poem’s inclusion in hymns at a temperance meeting, she tracked down the source and got it corrected. The song has no reference to God, but is based on Jesus’ quote in John 9:4, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work.”