The Prayer of Sir Francis Drake — commonly titled "Disturb Us, Lord" — is a short devotional poem, traditionally ascribed to the Elizabethan explorer 📝Sir Francis Drake, that asks to be shaken out of comfort and complacency and driven toward bolder horizons.
Despite the attribution, there is no verified evidence Drake wrote it; the text is widely regarded as a much later composition, likely twentieth-century, that attached itself to his seafaring legend. Its enduring power lies in the central image it borrows from that legend — the sailor who refuses to hug the safe shore and instead ventures onto wider seas, where "losing sight of land we shall find the stars."
📝Geoffrey von Maltzahn read the prayer to the graduating class at 📝Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s 2026 commencement, describing a copy of it kept on a century-old sheet of paper in his mother's chest of drawers — a poem he returns to at the crossroads of his life and at the founding of each company he has started. He read it in three movements across the address:
Disturb us
when we are too well pleased with ourselves.
When our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little.
Disturb us
when we've arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us when, with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the waters of life.
Having fallen in love with life we have ceased to dream of eternity.
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To disturb us who dare more boldly to venture on wider seas,
where storms will show your mastery,
where losing sight of land we shall find the stars.
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We ask you
to push back the horizons of our hopes,
and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope and love.