My Jesus I Love Thee is a poem written by William Ralph Featherston around 1864. Featherston is said to have been either 12 or 16 years old when he wrote the poem. The first two lines of this poem are nearly the same as a hymn written by Caleb J. Taylor, published in 1804; this hymn is used as the basis for the song Imandra by Ananias Davisson in the Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony in 1820, reprinted in Southern Harmony in 1835. There are other similarities between Featherston's poem and camp-meeting songs published in the 1820s onward.
Contents
In 1876 Adoniram Gordon added music to Featherston's poem. Featherston died at the age of 27, well before his poem had become a well-known inspirational hymn. The poem is believed to have been Featherston's only publicly published work.
Inspiration
According to Tim Challies,
Not much is known about Featherston, except that he attended a Methodist church in Montreal, that he was young when he wrote the poem (12 or 16 years old), and that he died at just 27 years of age. One story about how the poem became public is that Featherston mailed it to his aunt in Los Angeles who, upon reading it, quickly sought its publication... It wasn't until several years after Featherston's death that Adoniram Judson Gordon (founder of Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) added a melody and published it in his book of hymns, thus forever transforming this poem to a song.