Awake, my love, awake, my joy

Awake, my love, awake, my joy. John Mason. [Morning.] This piece is a composite morning hymn constructed from two separate compositions by John Mason. The original texts were first published in Mason's pioneer collection, Songs of Praise for Morning and Evening, in 1683, and were later made available to nineteenth-century hymnodists through Daniel Sedgwick's scholarly reprint in 1859.

The four-stanza cento is uniquely assembled by combining stanza i of Mason's Evening Hymn with stanzas ii, iii, and iv of his Morning Hymn. In this compiled form, it was adopted by the Reverend Thomas Darling for inclusion in the revised edition of his Hymns for the Church of England (1874, No. 198). Mason's devotional poetry, known for its vivid, fervent language and early influence on Isaac Watts, is well represented in this devotional arrangement, although its use in public congregational worship has remained somewhat limited outside of specialized Anglican collections.