Ah, I shall soon be dying

"Ah, I shall soon be dying" is a late eighteenth-century hymn composed by the English Baptist minister and hymnwriter Dr. John Ryland.

Although Dr. Ryland's son later dated the manuscript to 1800 and noted that his father wrote it while walking through the streets of London, hymnologists identified this date as an error. The hymn had already been published two years earlier in the Evangelical Magazine (October 1798) in eight four-line stanzas under the title "Reflections." A note accompanying its initial publication explained that the lines occurred to a country minister walking through London as he pondered how many acquaintances from his youth had advanced in age or had already been removed by death.

The text was subsequently reprinted in the Baptist Register (1800, p. 312) and included as No. 550, Part III, in the 27th edition of John Rippon's Selection of Hymns (1827–1828). Through Rippon's influential collection, the hymn passed into widespread congregational use across Great Britain and the United States. It was later collected and preserved in Daniel Sedgwick's reprint edition, The Hymns and Verses on Spiritual Subjects of Dr. John Ryland (1860).