Caroline Maria Noel

Caroline Maria Noel was an English Anglican poet and hymn writer born on April 10, 1817, into a prominent clerical family. Her father, the Hon. Gerard Thomas Noel, was a Church of England clergyman and hymn writer, and her uncle Baptist Wriothesley Noel was also a well-known minister. She began writing devotional poetry in her teens, including “Draw nigh unto my soul,” then wrote little for roughly two decades.

Long-term illness marked much of Noel's adult life and helped shape the devotional purpose of her later writing. She resumed sustained composition around the age of forty and published The Name of Jesus and Other Verses for the Sick and Lonely in 1861. The enlarged 1870 edition included her best-known hymn, “At the Name of Jesus,” under the heading “Ascension Day.” The collection was intended especially for private devotion and consolation, although several texts entered congregational use.

Noel's surviving reputation rests chiefly on the Christ-centered biblical concentration of “At the Name of Jesus,” but her wider body of devotional verse also reflects themes of suffering, submission, hope, and the name and cross of Christ. She died in London on December 7, 1877, and was buried near Romsey Abbey, where her father had served as vicar.