"Ah, wretched, vile, ungrateful heart" is an eighteenth-century Lenten hymn written by the English Baptist poet and hymnwriter Anne Steele. Subtitled "The Inconstant Heart," the text was first published in her collection Poems on Subjects chiefly Devotional (1760, Volume I, page 119), structured across five stanzas of four lines each.
The hymn was reprinted in the subsequent 1780 edition of her poetry and was later preserved in Daniel Sedgwick's reprint edition, The Hymns of Anne Steele (1863). Although its use remained virtually unknown in Great Britain, the text achieved significant adoption in North America. There, it was included in several major nineteenth-century collections, including Edwin Francis Hatfield's Church Hymn Book (1872, No. 970).
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