Farewell, poor world! I must be gone

adapted as
Farewell, dear friends, I must be gone

with
Farewell, dear Brethren in the Lord
Let us rise and go to Zion’s hill

I. Original Text

This hymn was one of nine hymns (or devotional poems) published by Samuel Crossman (1623–1684) in The Young Man’s Meditation (1664 | Fig. 1), a small collection published together with The Young Man’s Monitor, a work “intended for the endearing of God, and the bringing up [of] a good report upon piety and virtue in the hearts and hearing of young persons.” Crossman published this text the year before his ordination into the Church of England and his appointment as curate of St. Gregory’s and St. Peter’s in Sudbury. The original publication was without music, in seven stanzas of four lines, titled “The Pilgrim’s Farewell to the World,” and headed with Hebrews 13:14 from the King James Version.

In Crossman’s hymn, he spoke of a world he was unable to call home, a place where he was unable to find rest. As a homeless pilgrim he felt “weary and weak.” The hymn contains allusions to the ark of Noah, with its dove. Stanza four describes rising floods and troubled seas, and by the end of that stanza, the reader understands the author’s true destination: Heaven. In stanza five, the earth pleads with him to stay, but he dismissed the beckoning. For the writer, leaving earth means meeting his Lord.

II. Textual Development

Crossman’s text went unnoticed by other hymnal compilers for many years. Its first known appearance in a hymnal was in A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (New London: Timothy Green, 1774 | Fig. 2), compiled by Samson Occom (1723–1792), a Native American who became a Presbyterian minister and missionary. Occom’s version of the text was mostly faithful to the original, but it introduced two important changes within the first two lines: the simple change from “poor” to “vain,” and the phrasing of the second line, “I have no home or stay in thee.”

Occom’s version was adopted into some other collections, including Joshua Smith’s popular Divine Hymns or Spiritual Songs, starting with the eighth edition (1797), but then faded out of use within the next twenty years.

After the turn of the century, another version of the hymn appeared with significant changes, starting with A Choice Selection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Philadelphia: Dickinson & Heartt, 1805 | Fig. 3), an uncredited collection. Here, the hymn had a slightly different first line, “Farewell, dear friends, I must be gone,” probably modeled after other hymns in circulation at the time with similar beginnings (see “Dear friends, farewell”). The alternate rhyme (you/view) dates as early as 1793 (see Fig. 5), as does the refrain, except here the final two stanzas had their own refrains. Each of the final five stanzas was addressed differently: to friends, to “brethren in the Lord,” to “old soldiers of the cross,” to “blooming sons of God,” and “poor careless sinners.”

As with so many anonymous camp-meeting hymns of this time period, this one is derivative of others before it. The structure of the 1805 example is identical to another hymn, “Farewell, my brethren in the Lord,” in which each line starts with “Farewell” to a different listener. The words are different, but the idea is the same. That one traces as early as A Collection of Hymns Selected from Sundry Poets (1791 | Fig. 4).

III. PILGRIM’S FAREWELL

The hymn was first set to music in The Psalmodist’s Companion (Worcester, MA: Leonard Worcester for Isaiah Thomas, 1793 | Fig. 5), compiled by Jacob French. In this case, the opening line was rendered in triplet, “Fare you well, fare you well, fare you well, my friends,” etc. This is the earliest known example of turning Crossman’s “Farewell” into three syllables, and it is the first example of the alternate rhyme “you”/“view” instead of the previously printed “thee”/“see” (Fig. 2). The tune itself, printed in the tenor voice, covers the range of an octave from F to F, and it includes the first known example of this textual/musical refrain. While these types of tunes with repeated phrases were very common in the time period, those repeats were usually at the back half or end of the tune, whereas the repetition of the opening words like this is much less common. The sign :S: indicates a repeat of bars 9–16, and the numbers indicate a first and second ending (the second being held longer).

Jacob French printed the tune again in Harmony of Harmony (Northampton, MA: A. Wright, 1802 | Fig. 6), this time with a much longer refrain: “I’ll march to Canaan’s land / I’ll land on Canaan’s shore / Where pleasures never end / And troubles come no more.” This is the earliest known appearance of this refrain. In this printing, the set of four vertical dots marks the repeat. In the index, French credited to tune to an unknown “Field.”

When Jeremiah Ingalls adopted this tune into The Christian Harmony, or Songster’s Companion (Exeter, NH: Henry Ranlet, 1805 | Fig. 7), he used a text beginning “Let us rise and go to Zion’s hill,” but notice how the second stanza is borrowed from “Fare you well, my friends, I must be gone.” Ingalls’ source for this text is unclear; it has no apparent precedent in American hymnals. It was repeated in some other early hymnals, including Hymns, Original and Selected, for the Use of Christians, compiled by Elias Smith and Abner Jones.

When this tune was printed in Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (1813 | Fig. 8), John Wyeth returned the opening words to “Farewell,” which was better representative of how the words were being printed in text-only collections. Wyeth used a version of the text similar to Figure 3.

Lastly, when the hymn was adopted into Henry Ward Beecher’s influential Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes (NY: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1855 | Fig. 9), under the musical leadership of his son Charles Beecher, the opening of the tune had been recast to eliminate the trifold farewell.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
1 February 2021

Related Resources:

John Julian, “Farewell, poor world, I must be gone,” A Dictionary of Hymnology (London: J. Murray, 1892), p. 365: HathiTrust

“Farewell, vain world, I must be gone,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/farewell_vain_world_i_must_be_gone

“Farewell, dear friends, I must be gone,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/farewell_dear_friends_i_must_be_gone

Hymn Tune Index: https://hymntune.library.uiuc.edu/default.asp