"Ah, what a wretch am I" is an eighteenth-century Watch-night hymn composed by the English hymnwriter Charles Wesley. It was first published in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749) as the second entry under the section "Hymns for the Watch-night," consisting of ten eight-line stanzas.
Although the complete ten-stanza poem was rarely used in its entirety, several centos derived from it entered congregational use. Stanzas nine and ten, beginning with the line "Thou seest my feebleness," appeared in several nineteenth-century collections, including The Leeds Hymn Book (1853) and Baptist Psalms and Hymns (1858). Another notable cento starting at stanza five, "Gracious Redeemer, shake," was included in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (the Wesleyan Hymn-Book) in 1780 and retained in the revised edition of 1875.
In American hymnody, a variant of the "Gracious Redeemer, shake" cento appeared as "Father, this slumber shake," notably featured in the Unitarian Book of Hymns (1848) and Hymns of the Spirit (1864). The complete original text of the hymn was collected and preserved in The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley (1868 to 1872, Volume V, page 261).
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