The Composition
'Open My Eyes, That I May See' was written and composed by Clara H. Scott (1841-1897) and published in her collection Truth in Song in 1895. Scott was the first woman to publish a volume of anthems - a fact that her hymnological successors have noted as a marker of the gradually expanding participation of women in sacred music composition during the late nineteenth century. The hymn appeared just two years before her death in a carriage accident in 1897 and represents the culmination of her devotional and compositional career.
The hymn has three stanzas, each organized around a different sensory petition: the first stanza petitions for opened eyes ('that I may see / glimpses of truth thou hast for me'), the second for opened ears ('let me hear thee as thou speakest'), and the third for an opened mouth ('that I may speak / with words of fire, how thou dost save and keep'). This progression from receptive senses (sight, hearing) to expressive faculty (speech) gives the hymn a devotional logic: illumination received must become witness offered. The tune is Scott's own, a warm, accessible melody in ¾ time that suits the intimacy of the text.
Biblical Text
The primary scriptural foundation of the hymn is Psalm 119:18: 'Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.' This verse appears in the 'Beth' section of the longest chapter in the Bible - a 176-verse acrostic poem organized around all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in which each section of eight verses begins with the same Hebrew letter. The psalm's entire theme is the supremacy, beauty, and life-giving power of God's law (Torah), and verse 18 is its most explicit prayer for divine illumination in the reading of Scripture: the worshipper recognizes that understanding Scripture is not merely an intellectual achievement but a gift of God's grace.
Ephesians 1:17-18 provides a New Testament parallel: 'I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you.' Paul's prayer that the eyes of the heart - not just the physical eyes - may be opened connects the petitionary tradition of Psalm 119 to the Christological revelation of the New Testament.
Isaiah 35:5 - 'Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped' - belongs to the great eschatological vision of Isaiah 35, a passage of the restoration of sight and hearing that the New Testament applies to Jesus's healing miracles (Matthew 11:5, echoing Isaiah 35:5). Scott's hymn participates in this eschatological tradition: the opened eyes and ears petitioned in the hymn are not merely for natural perception but for the spiritual perception that belongs to the age of salvation.
The hymn's second stanza petition - 'silently, now, I wait for thee, ready, my God, thy will to see; open my ears, illumine me, Spirit divine' - reflects the tradition of contemplative prayer in which divine illumination is received in silence, a tradition rooted in Elijah's experience of God's 'still small voice' (1 Kings 19:12) and in the Psalms' repeated call to 'be still and know that I am God' (Psalm 46:10).
The Composer
Clara H. Scott (1841-1897) was born in Elk Grove, Illinois, and received her musical education at the Musical Institute in Chicago. She taught music at the Ladies' Seminary in Lyons, Iowa, and later worked as a music teacher and composer in Chicago. Her devotional and compositional life was shaped by the Holiness Movement and the late nineteenth-century Sunday School movement, both of which emphasized accessible sacred music as a tool for spiritual formation and Christian education.
Scott's distinction as the first woman to publish a volume of anthems reflects both her genuine compositional talent and the broader expansion of women's roles in American religious and musical life in the post-Civil War decades. Her work fits within the tradition of the gospel hymn - accessible melodies, devotional texts, personal faith expressed in first-person lyric - while reaching for a degree of scriptural specificity and theological depth that distinguishes the best examples of the genre from its more sentimental counterparts.
Musical Analysis
The tune, also called 'Scott' or 'Open My Eyes,' is in G major, in 3/4 time - a choice of meter that gives the hymn a gentle, waltz-like quality suggesting devotional intimacy rather than congregational proclamation. The melody's phrases rise in the petitionary lines and settle in the responsive lines ('Spirit divine'), creating a call-and-response structure at the level of the individual phrase. The refrain - 'open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit divine' - is the hymn's emotional center, the specific petition stated with a directness that the stanzas' elaboration supports.
The harmonization is uncomplicated, with the conventional dominant-tonic progressions of the gospel hymn tradition, but the text's specificity and the melody's warmth distinguish it from the generic gospel hymn. It is hymn writing in the service of prayer: the music's function is to carry the petition, not to display compositional skill.
Theological Content
The hymn belongs to the tradition of illuminationist prayer - the petition for divine light to illuminate the human mind and heart in the reading of Scripture and the discernment of God's will. This tradition runs from Psalm 119 through Augustine's theology of illumination (the doctrine that human knowledge of divine truth requires God's direct action on the mind), through the medieval mystical tradition, through Calvin's doctrine of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, to the modern evangelical tradition of personal Bible reading as a means of grace.
Scott's hymn operationalizes this tradition for congregational use: it provides a prayer that can be used before Bible study or worship to acknowledge human dependence on divine illumination and to invite the Spirit's work of making Scripture comprehensible and life-giving. Its three successive petitions for opened eyes, ears, and mouth suggest a complete receptivity to divine communication - a willingness to receive and transmit what God gives - that is the essence of the evangelical understanding of Christian discipleship.
Performance History
The hymn was adopted rapidly by the American Sunday School movement and by revival and Holiness congregations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It appeared in numerous hymnal collections in the first decades of the twentieth century and was regularly sung as an opening prayer before Bible study gatherings. Its association with the Sunday School movement gave it a particular role in Christian education contexts: it was sung at the beginning of Sunday School classes as a prayer for illumination in the study of Scripture.
Legacy
'Open My Eyes, That I May See' is a relatively modest piece in the grand scale of hymnological history - a Sunday School-era devotional hymn without the architectural ambition of Watts or the lyrical brilliance of Wesley - but it has earned its place in the repertoire through the precision of its scriptural foundation and the directness of its devotional petition. Its grounding in Psalm 119:18, the most specific biblical prayer for illumination in the reading of Scripture, gives it a theological density unusual in the gospel hymn tradition, and its practical function as a pre-study or pre-worship prayer has kept it in use across a wide range of Protestant congregational contexts for over a century.