A hymn about Our Lady at the Cross turns on one verb

TODI, Umbria, September 13, 2026 AD — The Church sings one sequence at the Mass of Our Lady of Sorrows on September 15, and it opens with Our Lady on her feet. Stabat Mater dolorosa, iuxta Crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat Filius — word for word, the sorrowful Mother was standing, in tears, beside the Cross, while the Son hung there. By the end of the poem the singer is asking to stand in the same place.

The hymn is the Stabat Mater dolorosa, ten stanzas of Latin about Our Lady at the Cross, written around the turn of the fourteenth century and sung at the memorial’s Office of Readings, Lauds and Vespers. It grows out of one sentence of Scripture. When the infant Jesus was brought to the Temple, Simeon said to his mother: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce.”

Three words carry the opening stanza. Stabat is an imperfect tense: not “she stood”, a single act, but “she was standing”, and went on standing. Iuxta means beside, hard against; it leaves no distance between her and the wood. And dum pendebat Filius, “while the Son was hanging”, runs her standing and his hanging together for as long as the sentence lasts. The English printed with the hymn, Father Edward Caswall’s, keeps little of that: “At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to Jesus to the last” turns a plain verb into a watch kept at a post.

The second stanza brings the sword down. Cuius animam gementem, contristatam et dolentem pertransivit gladius — translated literally, a sword has passed through her soul, groaning, grieved and in pain. The verb is the Gospel’s own: Simeon’s Latin runs tuam ipsius animam pertransibit gladius, literally a sword shall pass through thy own soul, and the poet has moved it out of the future tense into the past.

Franklin Johnson, who translated both this hymn and its companion in 1886 AD, counted the sounds the poem allows Our Lady. She trembles and she weeps. She wails once only, at the very end, after her Son has given up his spirit. That is the point where the mourning customs of the East required such lament. The picture, Johnson wrote, is one “of sorrow too deep for obtrusive manifestation: the sword has pierced the soul of the mother, but she endures in silence, and her agony acquires majesty from her quietude.”

Late in the hymn the grammar changes hands. The poet stops describing her and starts asking: Iuxta Crucem tecum stare, et me tibi sociare in planctu desidero — literally, I want to stand beside the Cross with you, and to join myself to you in mourning. The word from the first line, iuxta, comes back with tecum, with you, fastened to it. The requests get harder to carry into English from there: fac me Cruce inebriari asks to be made drunk on the Cross, and Caswall’s “steep my soul till it hath swooned” loses the drunkenness.

Who wrote it is not settled. Seven names have been put forward, and only two are held probable: Pope Innocent III, and the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi, who died in 1306 AD. Pope Benedict XIV gave the hymn to Pope Innocent III without qualification, citing three authorities. Most writers since have given it to Jacopone, with greater probability than to any other competitor — and the strongest case against him is his own work: it is doubtful he ever wrote Latin verse of his own rather than imitations of it.

Jacopone wrote in the Umbrian dialect of his region. Until about 1268 AD he was an advocate at Todi. A raised platform gave way under his wife, Vanna, at a public feast. Jacopone reached her and opened her rich dress, and found a hair cloth underneath — a penance Vanna had kept from him. He gave up the law and took the habit of a Franciscan tertiary. Once he crawled on all fours across the public square of Todi, saddled and bridled like an ass. The boys who mocked him in the streets gave him the name Jacopone. Jacopone answered the mockery in a couplet of his own: Senno me pare e cortesia, empazir per lo bel Messia — a wise and courteous choice he’d make, who’d be a fool for the dear Lord’s sake.

Whoever made it, the hymn did not stay in the friaries. By the end of the fourteenth century it was known to every class of people. Georgius Stella, the Chancellor of Genoa, recorded it in the annals of his city as in use among the Flagellants in 1388 AD. By 1399 AD whole towns were singing it on the roads of Provence, in nine-day processions of the bands called the Albati or Bianchi — the white ones — who fasted, prayed and went from church to church in white.

The Dolorosa has a twin. An edition of Jacopone’s Italian poems printed at Brescia in 1495 AD carried two Stabats: this one, at the Cross, and the Stabat Mater speciosa, at the manger — the same metre and phrasing turned to joy. The Speciosa was then almost forgotten until 1852 AD, when the French scholar Blessed Frédéric Ozanam copied it from a fifteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale and judged that Jacopone had written both at one sitting. Of the Dolorosa Ozanam wrote that “this incomparable work would have sufficed for the glory of Jacopone”.