O Lord my God, when sore bested
My evil life I do bewail,
What times the life I might have led
Arising smites me like a flail:

When I regard the past of sin,
Till sorrow drown me like despair;
The saint in me that might have been
With that I am when I compare:

Then grant the life that might have been
To be in fact through penitence;
All my past years discharged of sin,
And spent in grace and innocence:

And grant that I, when I forecast,
And shrink in fear of coming things,
May take this comfort of the past,
And lay it on my imaginings.
Amen.