Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Four lines printed in Boston in 1737 have gone to bed with more English-speaking children than any other prayer. "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" appears in the edition of The New England Primer issued by the printer Thomas Fleet, and from there it moved into schoolrooms, family Bibles, embroidered samplers, and eventually into films, pop songs and the name of a well-known bereavement charity.

It is short enough that a two-year-old can hold all of it, and blunt enough that adults still argue about the third line. Most parents who teach it today teach a version that has been quietly changed.

Origins

The New England Primer was the dominant school text of colonial America. First published in Boston in the late 1680s, it taught reading through the alphabet in rhyme, then moved on to the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the catechism. It stayed in print for well over a century and sold in the millions, which meant that anything printed in it reached almost every literate household in the region. The 1737 Fleet edition carries the earliest known appearance of the quatrain in the form still recited.

Older material is often put forward as the source. George Wheler's The Protestant Monastery of 1698 contains the couplet "Here I lay me down to sleep, To thee, O Lord, I give my soul to keep", and Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator on 8 March 1711, offered the prose sentiment "When I lay me down to sleep, I recommend myself to His care; when I awake, I give myself up to His direction". What is documented is the resemblance. No one has traced a direct line from either of those to the Primer text, and claims of a medieval Latin original are asserted far more often than they are shown.

The wider tradition is easier to establish. English children were being taught rhymed bedtime prayers long before 1737, most famously Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Black Paternoster, whose four angels and four bed corners descend from late medieval charm prayers. That is why the prayer is usually described as English in its roots and American in its printing.

Meaning & Interpretation

The prayer does one thing. It hands the sleeping self over to God for the hours when the child cannot look after it, and it treats sleep and death as the same act of letting go. That pairing is not a colonial invention. The old monastic night office of compline uses Psalm 31, "into thy hands I commend my spirit", and the same words are spoken by Jesus at the crucifixion in Luke's gospel. A four-line children's version compresses centuries of that idea into something a small child can say without help.

The second couplet is both the reason the prayer lasted and the reason it gets edited. It offers a real reassurance, that whatever happens in the night the child is still held. It also names the possibility out loud, which is what modern ears catch on.

Why does the prayer say "If I should die before I wake"?

Because it was written for children who knew other children who had died. Infant and child mortality in the eighteenth century was many times what it is now, and a childhood without a lost sibling or cousin was unusual. Death was a normal part of family life rather than something kept away from the nursery, and the prayer's job was to make it survivable in advance by promising that God had already been asked to take care of it. The line was comfort, not warning. Many parents today still find it too stark to say at bedtime, and softened versions are now at least as common as the original. Either choice is well within the tradition.

What is the modern softened version?

There is no single official replacement, but two endings do most of the work. One keeps the first couplet and continues "Guide me safely through the night, and wake me with the morning light". The other runs "Angels watch me through the night, and keep me safe till morning light". Both drop the reference to dying while keeping the meter, so a child who learns one can sing along with anyone reciting the other until the third line.

Is Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep in the Bible?

No. The prayer is a devotional verse of the early modern period, not scripture, and no version of it appears in any biblical text. Its central idea does have a biblical parallel in Psalm 31:5, "into thine hand I commit my spirit", which is echoed in Luke 23:46, but the rhyme itself was composed for English-speaking children and is first documented in print in 1737.