Awake, again the Gospel trump is blown

Awake, again the Gospel trump is blown. John Keble. [Advent.] This hymn was written on December 26, 1823, and first published in his celebrated devotional collection, The Christian Year, in 1827. In that work, it was appointed for Advent Sunday in 13 stanzas of 6 lines, accompanied by the scripture heading from the Epistle for the day: "Now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed."

Despite the immense popularity of The Christian Year as a devotional book, this specific poem saw very limited adoption as a hymn for public congregational worship. Its complex structure and introspective tone made it less suited for general singing than for private meditation. One notable exception where an abbreviated version was adapted for church collections appears in Benjamin Hall Kennedy's Hymnologia Christiana (1863, No. 19). In that volume, a four-stanza cento was formed using stanzas i, v, xii, and xiii of Keble's original poem, with a minor textual modification in the first line of the fifth stanza, altering Keble's original phrasing "E'en so" to read "Behold the world."