John Byrom

John Byrom (1691–1763), born at Kersal near Manchester, was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow. He devised a system of shorthand, and is remembered for the Christmas hymn ‘Christians, awake, salute the happy morn’.

A follower of the mystic William Law, he put passages from the writings of Jakob Boehme (Behmen) into English verse. The poems printed here are those given in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917), edited by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee; the text is taken from that anthology.