Pō Atarau lyrics (Now Is the Hour) and story

The Pō Atarau lyrics are the Māori words of “Now Is the Hour”, a New Zealand farewell song, and they open on a moonlit night: Pō atarau, e moea iho nei ‘on a moonlit night, I see in a dream’. The singer watches a loved one leave for a distant land and calls after them, Haere rā, ka hoki mai anō ‘farewell, come back again’. NZ History, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s site, says the song was used to farewell Māori soldiers leaving for the First World War; in English, as “Now Is the Hour”, it became a worldwide hit for Gracie Fields and Bing Crosby in 1948. In 2026 a 1976 recording by the Tūrakina Māori Girls’ Choir played in a farewell scene near the end of the film Project Hail Mary, which is why many people outside New Zealand are now looking it up. This guide gives the words, every line word for word from Te Aka Māori Dictionary, who wrote it and where the accounts differ, and how to pronounce it.

Updated 19 October 2026 · 11 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

The words of Pō Atarau

This is the Māori verse and the English verse as NZ History prints them. The two are often sung together, as on Ana Hato’s 1927 record, which has a verse in each language; the English verse is a separate farewell, not a translation of the Māori one.

Po atarau
E moea iho nei
E haere ana
Koe ki pamamao
Haere ra
Ka hoki mai ano
Ki i te tau
E tangi atu nei

Now is the hour,
when we must say goodbye
Soon you’ll be sailing,
far across the sea.
While you’re away,
Oh please remember me.
When you return,
you’ll find me waiting here.

NZ History prints the Māori without long-vowel marks. AudioCulture’s transcription of Ana Hato’s 1927 recording, the earliest one NZ Folk Song lists, writes them, and sings ki te tau where NZ History has ki i te tau; the table below follows the 1927 wording and Te Aka’s spelling. Both verses are free to print and sing in New Zealand: see the note on copyright.

Pō Atarau line by line

The middle column gives each word’s meaning from Te Aka Māori Dictionary. The last column is a plain reading of the line. For comparison, NZ Folk Song’s translation begins “On a moonlit night / I see in a dream / You going away / To a distant land”.

Māori	Word for word	What it says
Pō atarau, e moea iho nei	pō night; atarau moonlit (Te Aka’s own example has “ngā pō atarau”, moonlit nights); moea from moe, to sleep, close the eyes, dream, with its passive ending -a; iho down, downwards; nei here, and also which in a clause like this one	A moonlit night, dreamt of here,
E haere ana koe ki pāmamao	e … ana marks something going on; haere go, depart; koe you (one person); ki to, towards; pāmamao be distant, remote; distance	you are going away to a distant place.
Haere rā, ka hoki mai anō	haere rā goodbye, said to someone leaving; ka names an event, with no tense; hoki go back, return; mai towards the speaker; anō again	Farewell, and come back again
Ki te tau e tangi atu nei	ki to; te the; tau lover, darling, sweetheart, partner; e … nei who is (doing something) here; tangi cry, weep, and also sing; atu away from the speaker	to the loved one crying out to you here.

Pō atarau: the moonlit night

The title is two words: pō ‘night’, and atarau, which Te Aka gives as “moonlit” and also as “moonlight” and “moon”. Te Aka’s example sentence for it uses exactly this pairing, “Kei ngā pō atarau”, on moonlit nights. So Pō Atarau means a moonlit night; AudioCulture lists Ana Hato’s 1927 record under the one-word spelling Poatarau. The night is dreamt of: moe ‘sleep, dream’ is the everyday word for sleep, and iho points downwards, as Te Aka explains for all the direction words.

Haere rā: the farewell inside the song

The third line holds the most useful phrase in it. Te Aka defines haere rā as “goodbye (said to someone leaving), farewell!”, which is why the song is also known as Haere Rā: the person singing is the one who stays. The reply, from the person going, is E noho rā ‘goodbye, to the one staying’, and the pair is explained in Māori greetings and sign-offs. Then ka hoki mai anō ‘come back again’: hoki is to return, and mai turns the movement back towards the singer.

Tangi: weeping or singing?

The last line can be read two ways, and the dictionary allows both. Te Aka’s first sense of tangi is “to cry, mourn, weep”, and its second is “to sing, make a sound”. NZ Folk Song translates the line “To your loved one, weeping here”; the translation printed with the 1927 recording on AudioCulture has the loved one “beseeching you [with this song]”. Tau here is Te Aka’s “lover, darling, sweetheart”, and the e … nei around the verb works as in Te Aka’s example Ko Hōri te tangata e tū atu nei, “The man who is standing here is George”.

Kaihau’s 1935 version, as AudioCulture and NZ Folk Song print it, changes the first line to Haere rā, te manu tangi pai: manu ‘bird’, tangi, pai ‘good’. AudioCulture translates it “‘Bon voyage’ cries the seabird”, and the rest of the verse is the same.

Who wrote Pō Atarau?

The tune came first. NZ History traces it to “Swiss Cradle Song”, a piano piece published in Australia in 1913 by W. H. Paling and Co. and credited to Clement Scott; NZ Folk Song says Paling sold 130,000 copies. Allan Thomas, writing for AudioCulture, gives Clement Scott as the pen name of the Sydney musician Albert Saunders (1880–1946), while recording that who he was has itself been disputed. In New Zealand, NZ Folk Song says, the first 16 bars were changed from 4/4 time to 3/4 to make the tune of Pō Atarau.

Who put the Māori words to it is not settled. The 2026 news coverage, drawing on the research of the Wellington doctoral student Austin Haynes, credits Erima Maewa Kaihau (1879–1941), of Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Te Ata, with the vocal melody and the original Māori words in the mid-1910s. The older histories describe a song that several people shaped: NZ Folk Song records a Māori elder who remembered everyone singing it at Te Aute College in 1915 and 1916, and Thomas lists three competing claims to the words, none of them Kaihau’s.

What all the sources agree on is Kaihau’s English verse. NZ History says she wrote “This is the hour” in 1920; NZ Folk Song says it was for her eldest daughter, who had formed an attachment to a member of the visiting Prince of Wales’s party. Her words were registered for copyright in 1928. NZ History says that by 1935 the song was known as the Haere Rā Waltz Song; NZ Folk Song says the 1935 edition joined her English verse to a verse of a Rātana church hymn and a reworked Māori verse.

Kaihau was well known in her own lifetime. The Conversation, in an article by Haynes, says she was born Louisa Flavell in 1879 and grew up in Whangaroa in Northland, married the politician Hēnare Kaihau of Ngāti Te Ata, had songs published from 1918, and welcomed the Duke and Duchess of York in 1927 with a song of her own. RNZ reports that the rights to the song are believed to have been sold to a New Zealand music company for £10, and Haynes told RNZ she did not receive the attribution or payment she deserved.

Where the accounts differ

Question	One account	Another account
Who wrote the Māori words	Erima Maewa Kaihau, in the mid-1910s (RNZ and The Conversation, after Austin Haynes; The Spinoff says 1915)	unknown, with three competing claims: the Grace and Awatere families’ shearing gang on the East Coast, entertainers at Rotorua in 1918, or three guides at Whakarewarewa (Allan Thomas, AudioCulture); sung at Te Aute College in 1915–16 and changed by various people (NZ Folk Song)
What it was written for	to farewell Māori soldiers leaving for the First World War (NZ History; Te Ao Māori News)	Kaihau’s whānau believe it was perhaps not about the war, but for a British official her daughter loved or for the royal visit of 1927 (RNZ); a farewell to the shearing gang at the end of a season (the Grace family, in AudioCulture)
Where Gracie Fields learnt it	from a concert party in Rotorua, then her driver taught her (NZ History, 1945)	at the home of the tourist guide Rangitīaria Dennan (The Conversation); from Guide Kiri’s concert party (NZ Folk Song); AudioCulture dates her visit to 1946
Who sings it in Project Hail Mary	the Tūrakina Māori Girls’ Choir, 1976 (the music supervisor, in The Spinoff; Te Ao Māori News)	St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College (TheWrap’s list of the film’s songs)

A farewell song: troopships, wharves and the last waltz

For decades Pō Atarau and “Now Is the Hour” were what New Zealanders sang when someone left. NZ History says it was heard often during the Second World War as soldiers were farewelled, and became a favourite as the last waltz at dances. Allan Thomas, in AudioCulture, says that in the 1930s and 1940s it farewelled every passenger ship leaving the country, played by a brass band as the streamers between the deck and the wharf tore apart; Janet Frame wrote that when the band played it as her ship left, “the music reached down like a long spoon inside me and stirred, and stirred”.

1939. Kingi Tāhiwi and the Ngāti Pōneke group sang it aboard HMS Ramillies in Wellington Harbour on 15 December, as the battleship prepared to escort the First Echelon of troops (a newspaper report cited by Thomas).
1956 and 1974. Crowds sang it as the Springbok rugby team finished their last match of their 1956 tour, and, unprompted, as the Queen left the 1974 Commonwealth Games (Thomas).
Any gathering. Church meetings, marae gatherings, school functions and tramping club trips could all end with it (Thomas); The Spinoff adds funerals, leaving parties and memorials.
The hymn. The American evangelist J. Edwin Orr heard “the beautiful Māori song of farewell, Pō Atarau” on a visit in 1936 and wrote the hymn “Search Me, O God” to the tune; AudioCulture says the hymn is well known in America and elsewhere.

A song is one way of saying goodbye; the formal one is the speech. Te Aka defines poroporoaki ‘farewell, leave-taking’ as “to take leave of, farewell”, and where those speeches come in a welcome ceremony is explained in Pōwhiri explained. If you are learning one Māori song for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, the other strong candidate is the love song Pōkarekare Ana.

Famous recordings of Now Is the Hour

Ana Hato and Deane Waretini, 1927. The earliest recording NZ Folk Song lists, on Parlophone, with the first verse in Māori and the second in English (AudioCulture). NZ Folk Song adds Ernest McKinlay around 1928 and George Nepia around 1935.
Gracie Fields, 1947. The English singer sang her version on BBC radio in July 1947, and her recording became a huge international hit (NZ History). In January 1948, Time magazine reported, 24,000 copies of it arrived in Manhattan.
Bing Crosby, 1948. His version entered the American charts in February 1948 and was his 42nd and last single to reach number one (NZ History). NZ Folk Song says he recorded it in November 1947 with the Ken Darby Choir, and that his version includes the “Sunset glow” bridge, which Fields left out.
Vera Lynn, Frank Sinatra and others. RNZ lists them among the later crooners; AudioCulture shows releases by John Rowles (1968), the Amorangi Boys of Rotorua (1960) and the Rangatira Māori Opera Group (1965).
Choirs. NZ History’s own audio of the song is sung by the St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College choir, and the recording in Project Hail Mary is a girls’ school choir too.

Pō Atarau in Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling science-fiction film in cinemas from March 2026, uses Pō Atarau in what The Spinoff calls its climactic scene, “when a choir of women’s voices starts to ring through outer space” with the opening words. Te Ao Māori News describes it as a pivotal farewell scene near the end of the film.

The recording is the Tūrakina Māori Girls’ Choir’s, made in 1976 for the album Turakina Sings, part of the Wellington label Viking Seven Seas’ catalogue, The Spinoff reports. The film’s music supervisor, Kier Lehman, told The Spinoff he was building a “mixtape from Earth” and found the song “while searching for goodbye songs from different cultures”: he knew it was special “because of how it conveyed the sentiment of saying goodbye, even if you didn’t understand the lyrics.” He chose that recording because it “fit perfectly with the tone and pace of the scene”, and says that when he played it for the directors “they got goosebumps and were instantly sold”.

Tūrakina Māori Girls’ College closed in 2015. Its last principal, Terehia Channings, told Te Ao Māori News: “It’s a goodbye song, that’s what makes it so fitting.” The film’s song list on TheWrap credits the track to St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College, a different school, but the music supervisor’s own account and Te Ao Māori News both name Tūrakina.

How to pronounce Pō Atarau

Every Māori syllable ends in a vowel, so the title breaks up as Pō a-ta-rau: four beats, with the au at the end gliding from a to u in one syllable, as the Māori pronunciation guide explains for ai, ae, ao, au and ou. The rest of the song follows the same rules:

Long vowels. Hold the marked vowels a little longer: pō ‘night’, the first ā of pāmamao ‘distant’, and anō ‘again’.
The tapped r. atarau, haere rā ‘goodbye’: one quick tap of the tongue, never an English r.
Every vowel sounded. moea is three syllables, mo-e-a.

Is Pō Atarau out of copyright?

Yes, both verses printed here are, in New Zealand. The Copyright Act 1994 protects a song’s words for 50 years from the end of the year its author dies, or, when the author is unknown, 50 years from when it was first made public. The Māori verse was recorded in 1927 and its author is unknown; if it is Kaihau’s, she died in 1941, as did the author of the English verse. Either way the words have been free since 1991 at the latest, and even a life plus 70 term, which New Zealand has agreed to adopt but had not enacted when this page was written, would have ended in 2011. The “Sunset glow” bridge added in the 1940s is credited to Dorothy Stewart and is not reproduced here; translations, arrangements and recordings, including the one in the film, are separate works.

Going further

Most of the song is beginner’s vocabulary: haere ‘go’, hoki ‘go back’, tangi ‘weep’, tau ‘sweetheart’, pō ‘night’ and the grammar of e … ana and ka are all taught in Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course. If you came here from a film, the other Māori text you may have heard on screen, at a rugby match, is explained line by line in the Ka Mate haka.