In 1931 an Anglican priest named Percy Dearmer was editing a new hymnal called Songs of Praise. Among the melodies he hoped to include was an old Gaelic tune called Bunessan, named after a tiny village on the Isle of Mull. It was a beautiful melody, but there was a practical problem. No existing hymn fit its unusual meter, so Dearmer asked Eleanor Farjeon, already known for her poetry and children’s books, if she would write one.
She did. The hymn appeared in the collection, one among hundreds of others. Had the story ended there, few people outside the church would ever have known it existed.
Forty years later Cat Stevens recorded Morning Has Broken.
For many of us, that recording became the song. We remember Rick Wakeman’s luminous piano introduction, Stevens’ unmistakable voice, and those opening words:
“Morning has broken like the first morning...”
The song settled quietly into people’s lives.
Spend a little time reading comments beneath recordings of it today and something interesting happens. People rarely write about Cat Stevens. They write about themselves.
One woman remembers her husband, who loved the song. After he died unexpectedly, it was played at his funeral. Every Easter morning she listens to it again because it brings him close.
Another person writes about losing a dear friend. She watched the sunrise while the song played, then later that day, standing in the coffee aisle of a grocery store, heard it unexpectedly over the speakers. She began to cry because, for a brief moment, it felt as though her friend had found a way to say hello.
Farjeon never knew any of these people. She never knew the widow, or the woman standing in the grocery store, or the countless listeners who would quietly weave her words into the stories of their own lives. Her task had simply been to write a poem for an old melody that needed one.
I’ve often found that thought comforting.
When we write, it’s easy to believe that the page is the end of the story. We finish the poem, the journal entry, the letter, the essay, or the novel, and we imagine that our work is over. In one sense it is. We can no longer decide where those words will travel or what they will come to mean. Yet perhaps that is exactly when another part of their life begins.
I think that’s one of the best reasons to begin writing now.
We have almost no ability to predict what our work will eventually become.
Emily Dickinson comes to mind whenever I think about this. During her lifetime she published very little. Most of her poems remained in the small hand-sewn booklets she quietly made for herself. She had no way of knowing that generations later readers would discover those pages and recognize themselves there.
One reader, writing about Dickinson’s poem After great pain, a formal feeling comes, described the extraordinary relief of finding language for an emotional landscape that had always felt impossible to explain. It wasn’t advice that mattered. It wasn’t encouragement. It was recognition. Someone else, separated by more than a century, had known this strange territory and left behind a map.
That may be one of the quiet gifts writing offers us.
We often think our task is to explain something, persuade someone, or leave behind an important message. Sometimes writing does those things. But sometimes it simply says to another human being, You are not the first person to stand where you are standing.
I suspect we are also poor judges of our own work while we are making it.
We notice the awkward sentence, the unfinished paragraph, the chapter that refuses to cooperate. We worry that the story is too ordinary, the memory too small, the observation too familiar. We are looking at the work from only one moment in its life.
The reader may encounter it much later, carrying experiences we cannot imagine and questions we could never have anticipated. They may find something we didn’t even know we had written.
The first person your writing serves may be you. That is already enough.
But the work may not stop there.
It may travel quietly into other lives, gathering meanings that never belonged entirely to its author. It may wait years before it finds the reader who needs it. It may never become famous, and it doesn’t have to. Eleanor Farjeon didn’t set out to write a song that would circle the world. She answered a request for words that would fit an old melody. The rest of the story belonged to time, to music, and to people she would never meet.
Writers don’t get to know that part.
Our work is simply to begin.
