Another year is dawning

Written by Frances Ridley Havergal in 1874, this beloved New Year hymn was initially composed for use on ornamental greetings cards and devotional leaflets published by Caswell for the 1875 New Year season. Formatted in six stanzas of four lines, the poem expresses prayerful trust, consecration, and hope at the threshold of a new year, asking for continued grace, deeper service, and closer fellowship with God. Havergal subsequently included the text in her published collection Under the Surface (1874) and later in Life Chords (1880). Owing to its graceful lyricism and deeply personal spiritual tone, the hymn quickly became one of the most widely adopted New Year texts in English and American hymnals, maintaining enduring popularity in Protestant worship throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.