All creation groans and travails

"All creation groans and travails" is a ten-stanza hymn written by the scholar and hymnwriter John Mason Neale during the British cattle plague outbreak of 1866. Entitled "Cattle Plague Hymn," it was composed for the national Fast Day appointed during the agricultural crisis and first appeared in The Guardian. Shortly after its initial publication, it was issued with music by Novello and subsequently included in Neale's posthumous collection Original Sequences, Hymns, &c. (1866), published under the editorial supervision of Dr. Richard Frederick Littledale. It was later reprinted in The Hymnary in 1872.