Baptism, in this hymn, is less a washing than a funeral. The heading says "Believers buried with Christ in baptism" and points to Romans 6, and the twelve lines unpack that idea. To be baptized is to share in Christ's death, so the old, sinful self is dead and buried. What rises afterwards is a new life, and a dead self cannot be ruled by sin. The poem's central idea is that dying and rising change who holds authority over a person.
The three stanzas move from memory to pattern to command. The opening question, "Do we not know that solemn word", doesn't teach anything new. It nudges the singers to recall what they already believe, which suits a poem meant to be spoken by a group. The second stanza lays out the pattern in two movements: souls "receive diviner breath," just as "from the grave did Christ arise." The third turns that pattern into a resolution: "No more let sin or Satan reign." The poem begins with knowing, moves to understanding, and ends with a promise about how to live.
The form is plain and sturdy. Each stanza has four lines of eight syllables, rhymed in couplets, and the beat is a steady iambic one that is easy to sing and easy to remember. Most words are short, often a single syllable: "buried," "grave," "death," "sin," "God." Nothing gets in the way of the doctrine. The rhymes also work as small arguments. "Arise" is paired with "skies," so rising ends in heaven. "Reign" is paired with "again," which quietly admits that the fear of relapse is real. The first stanza's "then" and "sin" is an imperfect rhyme to modern ears, but it still binds the two ideas. Read aloud, the line "Raised from corruption, guilt, and death" begins with a stressed "Raised" that gives a slight lift, and the three-part list of what is left behind slows the line before the rhyme releases it.
The imagery runs along a vertical axis. The first stanza goes down into burial and the second stanza's "grave" and "corruption." Then the poem climbs: "diviner breath," "arise," "above the skies." Breath is a well-chosen image because it is both the simplest sign of being alive and, in "diviner breath," a sign that the life is not merely natural. A different image of change appears in the first stanza: to "put off the body of our sin" is to take off a garment. The old self is something you can undress from, which makes the transformation feel decisive and practical.
The last stanza shifts from burial to politics. Sin and Satan "reign," lusts are "served," and "dominion" is the thing they must give up. Sin is cast as a tyrant with subjects, and the believer is a former servant who has been released. "Mortal flesh" belongs to the same contrast as "diviner breath," since the body that can die is the very place where the old rule might creep back. The word "dominion" is also one that Romans 6 uses in the King James Bible, so Watts is compressing the apostle's argument into his own rhymes. The repeated "no more," once in the stanza's first line and again in its last, closes the hymn with a door shutting. The phrase "the various lusts we served before" suggests a long list of masters, and the word "now" sets them against the present.
Part of the hymn's significance lies in that compression. A dense piece of theology, with burial, resurrection, baptism and moral change all linked, fits into twelve lines that a congregation could hold in memory. The pronouns "we" and "our" matter here. Nobody in the poem is a lone speaker making a private confession, and the whole group declares the same fact about itself and makes the same vow. For a modern reader the interest is in how much a restrained form can carry. There is no elaborate figurative language, just a few strong metaphors repeated until they feel like common sense: the grave and the sky, the garment cast off, the tyrant dethroned.