At dawn I come to You

This poem, popularized in recent years through its inclusion in some modern prayer books, considers man’s inability adequately to praise God. Ibn Gabirol focuses on the human mind, the very vehicle that medieval thinkers used to analyze the divine. The middle stanza appears to draw on the Arabic aphorism “the heart and tongue are the whole of man”; the phrase is here translated into Hebrew and given theological meaning. The poem, a reshut, introduces the prayer that begins “Nishmat kol hay” (“May the soul [breath] of every living being”).