Solomia Kazanivska (Соломія Казанівська) (Ukrainian, 1996–), Mother of God, 2019. Acrylic and soil on wood, 60 × 40 cm.
I.
Here mothers move more than others
into Mary’s mourning, each chorus
a soul full of crosses, weighted
with her child dying
continuously in the contemplation
of our contrition.
II.
That once-upon-a-time angel’s voice
stretching anew her middle-aged womb,
she who once sang Magnify, O Magnify,
when all she screams for now
is mercy in her urgent rebirth
of sorrow.
III.
When he stumbles,
she cannot fix his fall,
cannot cradle the boyhood
scrapes and bruises bleeding
into crowd-sanctioned murder.
No cock crows; she hears his groans
as if the world’s bones
are splintering within her.
IV.
Besides the tree, he carries
the tears of the one who carried him
beneath her Eve ribs, lifted him
into a world he breathed as good,
gone now into this God-crucified-
as-her-son catastrophe
for salvation’s sake.
V.
Simon of Cyrene stands close.
Understanding too well the two sorrows—
mother and son helpless to comfort the other—
he heaves up and shoulders
the burdens of both,
his back the black tablet
of Moses’ commandments fulfilled
to the jot and tittle.
VI.
Veronica—eyes swollen
for the Madonna and Child
wrenched from their rightful honor—
lifts her veil to cool the Savior’s pain,
alleviate, however slightly, a mother’s anguish.
VII.
Thorns gouge the brow she stroked.
The sweat-caked man that came out of her
stumbles again. Already,
the sharp nails gnaw her own palms.
VIII.
Oh, daughters of Jerusalem,
your tears sweep the streets,
wet the weary soles of Mary.
Weep for your own children
forever dashing away from Yahweh.
IX.
Wretched stones that tip her sinless child,
dirt that drives down the innocent son.
His own earth hurts him more each tumble.
Three times he trips,
crashes to the dust we are,
mortal muscles turning their backs
on Man and his Mother.
X.
Threads twisted by her own fingers,
tugged carefully through cloth:
this is the tunic they rip from him,
fabric tattooed with red;
she remembers his baby body
blood-splattered and matted.
XI.
Her soul stabbed by the tree
that slays her son. Her heart nailed.
She swears his life spurts
from her barely breathing body.
XII.
Death is indigo and indelible,
the Roman sky collapsed and re-scribbled
on the shreds of her memories.
She cannot bear to look upon his face
when breath forgets its maker.
XIII.
Ten thousand stillborns better
than this: his torso in her arms,
icon of the inconsolable,
the flesh Pietà with its nails of pain,
pounding, pounding.
XIV.
The hewn tomb seals her grief.
She remembers his first words,
his final prayer. All else rots
within her. They swaddle him,
implant him quickly behind stone.
This poem is from Weeknights at the Cathedral (Cincinnati: WordTech Communications, 2006) and is anthologized in slightly revised form, as here, in Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, ed. Luke Hankins (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012).Used by permission of the author.
Note: The Stations of the Cross are a form of Catholic devotion organized around the events of Christ’s passion, from his condemnation by Pilate to his crucifixion and burial.
Marjorie Maddox (born 1959) is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Begin with a Question (Paraclete, 2022); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation from the Poiema Poetry Series (Wipf & Stock, 2018); and True, False, None of the Above (Wipf & Stock, 2016). She has also published a short story collection, four children’s and YA books, and 650-plus stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Living in Central Pennsylvania, she is a professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University and is the assistant editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry.
In the thirteenth century, a new subject emerged in painted Passion cycles in both East and West: Christ resolutely climbing a ladder to the cross. He ascends willingly, even enthusiastically, demonstrating a heroic acceptance of death. In taking those steps up onto the instrument of his martyrdom, he exercises agency. As he tells a gathered crowd in John 10:18, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down . . .” Out of love for the world, he gives himself as a sacrifice, bringing about reconciliation between God and humanity.
The iconography of the Ascent of the Cross (alternatively referred to as “Christ Mounts the Cross”) is of Byzantine origin and can be found in Macedonian and Serbian church frescoes.
Michael Astrapas and Eutychios, Ascent of the Cross (at right), 1295. Fresco, Church of the Holy Mother of God Peribleptos (aka Church of Saint Clement), Ohrid, North Macedonia. Photo: Vera Zavaritskaya.Ascent of the Cross, 1298. Fresco, Church of St. Nicholas, Prilep, North Macedonia. Photo: P. S. Pavlinov.Ascent of the Cross, 1317. Fresco, Church of St. George, Staro Nagoričane, North Macedonia.Ascent of the Cross, 1343–45. Fresco, Church of St. George, Pološko, North Macedonia.
In a fresco from the Church of St. George at Staro Nagoričane, a small Roman military detachment has just led Jesus to the site of his execution. A young enslaved Roman fixes the cross into the ground, instructed by an older slave who holds a basket of nails, while a third stands on the suppedaneum and waits to nail Jesus’s hands into place. Caiaphas, the Jewish chief priest, points to the cross, indicating to Christ to ascend it. Christ grabs hold of the rungs and climbs, while at the top left, from behind a rock, the Virgin Mary and John look on in grief.
Byzantine painting greatly influenced the Italian painters of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Many of them adopted Byzantine models, of which the Ascent of the Cross is one example.
Pacino di Bonaguida (Italian, Florentine, 1280–1340), Ascent of the Cross, from the picture-book Scenes from the Life of Christ and the Life of the Blessed Gerard of Villamagna, ca. 1320. Tempera and gold leaf on parchment, 9 5/8 × 6 7/8 in. (24.5 × 17.6 cm). Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, M. 643, fol. 12r.
In a Ferrarese church lunette fresco in the Benedictine nuns’ monastic complex of Sant’Antonio in Polesine, two men kneel on the cross’s patibulum as Christ mounts the ladder propped against it. He wears a translucent loincloth, emphasizing his nakedness and humiliation. Knowing Christ’s innocence, an elderly Jewish man tries to intervene to prevent the brutality, but he is restrained by soldiers. On the right, a group of Romans argues over who will get to keep Christ’s cloak, a souvenir from this regional celebrity.
Christ Mounts the Cross on a Ladder, 14th century. Fresco, Monastery of Sant’Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara, Italy.
In some versions of the Ascent of the Cross, Jesus is pushed or pulled into position, or at least aided, by soldiers, with whom he readily cooperates. Such is the case in the earliest identified instance of the subject, from an eleventh-century Armenian Gospel-book. (Armenians were the largest non-Greek ethnicity in the Byzantine Empire.)
Ascent of the Cross, from the Vehapar Gospels, Armenia, early 11th century. Matenadaran, Yerevan, MS 10780, fol. 125v.
Art historian Thomas F. Mathews says that in the Armenian tradition, Golgotha is identified with the place where the Jewish patriarch Jacob had a vision of angels trafficking a ladder connecting heaven and earth. “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven,” Jacob exclaimed, dubbing it Bethel, Hebrew for “house of God” (Gen. 28:10–22). In Armenian manuscript illuminations, Mathews argues, the subject of Christ ascending the cross, very often followed by a depiction of Christ’s dead body descending from the cross, was thus interpreted as an extension of Jacob’s vision, as by climbing up and down the ladder of the cross, Christ opened heaven’s gate.[1]
Another Armenian Gospel-book miniature of the subject, from the early fourteenth century, is particularly striking in how it shows Christ turning, mid-climb, toward the viewer, his direct gaze engaging our pity and love.
T‘oros Taronec‘i, Ascent of the Cross, from the Gladzor Gospels, Armenia, 1300–1307. UCLA Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, Armenian MS 1, p. 283.
In some versions from Italy, Mary grabs her son around the waist, trying to prevent him from experiencing further torture. Take, for example, the panel painting by Guido da Siena that was originally part of the Madonna del Voto altarpiece in Siena’s cathedral. Her mama-bear instinct kicking in, Mary pushes away one of her son’s tormentors with one arm and with the other protectively encircles her son, unable to let him go.
Guido da Siena (Italian, Sienese, 1230–1290), Ascent of the Cross, ca. 1265–74. Tempera on poplar wood, 34.5 × 46 cm. Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Some Christians are wary of suggesting that the Mother of God would seek to deter God’s plan, but let’s remember that, devout as she was, Mary was not superhuman. The death sentence passed against her son and the violence that followed naturally unleashed a flood of emotion in her and an impulse to resist. What mother wouldn’t do everything in her power to save her child from harm? No matter how much she believed in her son’s mission, what mother wouldn’t reach out for one last embrace, if only to delay the inevitable?
That said, Mary’s gesture here may be one of attempting not to impede his ascent but to cover his nakedness. In the widely influential Meditations on the Life of Christ, a text that originated in early fourteenth-century Tuscany and circulated in Latin and all the major European vernaculars,[2] Mary responds in agony to Jesus’s being shamefully stripped for all to see, and she intervenes with a small mercy:
Oh what anguish this was to his mother, to see her most sweet son naked like this, standing like a lamb among these wicked wolves!
Then the mother, full of sorrow, went up close to her most sweet son and took the veil from her head and wrapped it around Lord Jesus Christ with bitter sorrow. And I do not know how she did not fall dead to the earth.[3]
Closely related to the Guido panel is one by an anonymous artist from Umbria or Tuscany that was the central panel of a portable altarpiece with two wings, possibly painted for the Basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi. It depicts the Ascent of the Cross—again, with the Virgin Mary interceding—above a scene of the Funeral of Saint Clare (d. 1253), a close follower of Saint Francis and the founder of the Poor Clares religious order.
Christ Mounting the Cross and the Funeral of Saint Clare (detail), Umbria or Tuscany, 1290s. Tempera and silver leaf on panel, overall 31 1/4 × 20 3/8 in. (79.4 × 51.8 cm). Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.
For the iconography of the Ascent of the Cross, art historian Anne Derbes identifies a possible literary source as Pseudo-Bede’s De meditatione passionis Christi: “Then, when the cross had been prepared, they [the people] cry: ‘Ascend, Jesus, ascend.’ O how freely He ascends, with what great love for us He bore everything, with what patience, what gentleness!”[4]
Terser references to this episode, Derbes points out, appear in Pseudo-Anselm’s Dialogus, which mentions that Christ “ascends the wood of the cross,”[5] and in Ambrose’s commentary on Luke, in which Ambrose remarks that “it was not his cross that Christ ascended, but ours,” and that Christ ascended the cross “as a victor ascends a triumphal chariot.”[6]
Derbes also notes the possible influence of the adoratio crucis (adoration of the cross) ritual, known in Jerusalem from the fourth century and in the West from the seventh or eighth, which states, “O Lord Jesus Christ, I adore you climbing onto the cross.”[7]
[In the tiled gallery below, click on the image to view the caption and source URL.]
The long Latin version of the Meditations, which, from the mid-fourteenth century, postdates most of the paintings shown here, also mentions the Ascent of the Cross, perhaps itself influenced by trecento visual culture:
Now diligently behold the process of Crucifixion. Two ladders are accustomed to be placed, one on the one side, the other on the other; upon these, wicked men go up, with nails and hammers; while another ladder is placed in front, reaching to that part of the Cross where the feet are to be nailed. Contemplate now each event Our Lord may have been compelled by means of this small ladder to ascend the Cross, for He does whatsoever they bid Him, humbly, without resistance or complaint. Having reached the top of the ladder, He turns Himself round, it may be, opens His arms, and extends His Hands—so royal and beautiful—and yields Himself up to His crucifiers.
. . . Some there are who think that this was not the method of Crucifixion, i.e. by making our Lord ascend a ladder before the nailing of His Body to the Cross; but that they fastened Him to the Cross when it was laid on the ground before it was raised.[8]
Interestingly, the writer, as he does elsewhere in the manuscript, allows for the possibility that the action may have occurred in one of two ways. Actually, probably neither of the two options he describes for how Christ was nailed to the cross is accurate. Ancient historians think it most likely that Jesus was nailed to the horizontal crossbeam while it lay on the ground, which was then lifted up, his body attached, and dropped into a notch in the permanently fixed vertical post.[9]
However, the Ascent of the Cross isn’t so much meant to be a literal portrayal of what happened historically as it is an expression of the theological truth that Christ went to his death voluntarily. He was not forced onto the cross against his will. The Ascent suggests divine initiative and purpose. Even in those images where Christ is being prodded by his executioners, he does not resist. Instead, he bounds onward and upward to his chosen end.
In medieval English literature, the freedom and strength of Christ in his death is often emphasized. In the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” from the eighth century, the cross says, “Then I saw mankind’s Lord / hasten with great zeal, as though he wanted to climb on me.”[10] In Middle English religious lyrics, which come down to us mainly through preaching manuscripts, Christ mounts the cross much like a knight does his steed, prepared for battle, but of a spiritual kind.[11]
One anomalous example of the Ascent of the Cross that I found comes from Reformation Germany. A copperplate engraving by Augustin Hirschvogel[12] shows a muscly Christ mounting the cross with three figures slung over his shoulder: a clawed, beaked, horned creature representing the devil; a skeleton representing death; and what looks like a bloated corpse, probably representing sin. The tone is triumphant, as Christ’s death defeats this formidable trio. They are nailed to the cross with him, but unlike him, never to rise.
Augustin Hirschvogel (German, 1503–1553), Christ Ascending the Cross with Sin, Death, and the Devil, 1547. Etching, 11.8 × 14.8 cm (image) / 15.1 × 14.8 cm (sheet). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Christ Ascending the Cross with Sin, Death, and the Devil is one of a group of over one hundred etchings of biblical scenes commissioned by the Hungarian aristocrat and politician Peter Perényi (1502–1548) for his Concordance of the Old and New Testaments, first published in Vienna by the printer Aegidius Adler in 1550. Perényi selected the scenes and wrote the letterpress captions beneath them. This one reads,
Noch mer Christus am creutz uberwand Desshalben von Gott war selb gesandt Und den teueffel Hell alles band Drumb er unser erlöser ist genannt. Luc. 23e. Corinth.5f.
On the cross, it says, Christ overcame hell and the devil, and that’s why we call him “Redeemer.” The biblical citations are to the Crucifixion account in Luke 23 and to 2 Corinthians 5:14–21, which begins, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for the one who for their sake died and was raised” (NRSV).
A follower of Martin Luther and a friend of Philip Melanchthon, Perényi was an influential protector of Protestant preachers in the kingdom of Hungary. But his shifting political allegiances got him into trouble when in 1542 he was imprisoned by Ferdinand I, a Habsburg prince, for disloyalty. It was from a prison in Vienna that he worked on his concordance project.
All these artworks of Christ ascending the cross show his bravery, dignity, and poise in the face of persecution, his heroic self-giving that wins the world’s salvation. Despite his mother’s tearful entreaties, and despite the pain he knows is coming, he remains steadfast, his eyes fixed on the prize that will be attained on Easter morning.
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1. Thomas F. Mathews and Avedis K. Sanjian, Armenian Gospel Iconography: The Tradition of the Glajor Gospel (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1990), 131–32.
2. This text is traditionally attributed to a Franciscan friar known as Pseudo-Bonaventure and believed to have originated in Latin (title: Meditationes de vitae Christi), but Sarah McNamer has persuasively argued that its originator was a woman, a Poor Clare from Pisa, who wrote it in Italian for her fellow nuns sometime between 1300 and 1325. Within the next decade and a half, McNamara proposes, a Franciscan friar expanded and altered it to make it more didactic, creating first another Italian version (the “testo minore”) and then translating this into Latin to “authorize” it and make it more disseminatable. The long Latin text has become canonical but is, McNamara argues, inferior to the base text, compromising its narrative pacing and emotional impact. See Sarah NcNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
3. Translated by Sarah McNamer from Oxford, Bodeleian Library MS Canonici Italian 174 (the “testo breve”), in Meditations, 141.
4. “Deinde parata cruce dicunt ei, ascende, Jesu, ascende. O quam libenter ascendit, o quanto amore ista omnia pro nobis sustinuit, o quanta patientia, o quanta mansuetudo!”(PL 94:565). Translated by Anne Derbes in Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154.
6. “Non enim suam, sed nostram crucem christus ascendit” (PL 15:1923); “currum suum triumphator ascendit” (PL 15:1924). Qtd. Derbes, 242n56.
7. “Domine Ihesu Christi, adoro te in cruce ascendentem,” qtd. Derbes, 242n56, from Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), 117–19.
8. S. Bonaventure, The Life of Christ, trans. and ed. Rev. W. H. Hutchings (London: Rivingtons, 1881), 267, xiii–xiv. Sarah McNamer says that while (what she argues is) the original Meditations text describes a crucifixion method known as jacente cruce—Christ nailed to the cross as it lies prone on the ground—the Italian recension and subsequent translations and versions that came soon after privilege the erecta cruce method, in which Christ ascends a ladder to an upright cross and thus is nailed from an elevated position (Meditations, 228n126).
9. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 25; Robin Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 10.
10. “Geseah ic þā Frēan mancynnes / efstan elne micle, þæt hē mē wolde on gestīgan.”
11. The metaphor of Christ’s cross as a horse that he bravely mounts as if for battle occurs in MS Balliol 149 (cf. MSS Magdalen 93 and Trinity Dublin 277), Nicolas Bozon’s poem “Sa sele fu trop dure, et mout l’ad anguise,” MS Bodley 649, and MS Harley 2316. See Rosemary Woolf, Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: The Hambledon Press, 1986), 113–15.
12. Hirschvogel was trained as a stained-glass painter in the workshop of his father, but when his hometown of Nuremberg accepted Luther’s Protestant teachings, the workshop lost its church commissions. Hirschvogel thus pivoted to designing maps and fortification plans and, in his final decade, making landscape etchings as part of the Danube School. Richard Manly Adams Jr., “One Acquisition, Two Great Traditions at Pitts,” Reformation Notes no. 56 (Summer 2021): 5.
VIDEO: “Waiting with Christ: An Artful Meditation for Holy Week”: A collaboration between Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts in Durham, North Carolina, and City Church in Cleveland, Ohio, this half-hour video from 2021 presents a small collection of scripture readings, poems, visual art, and music for Holy Week, interspersed with reflections by theologian Jeremy Begbie. The artistic selections are a spoken word performance by Paul Turner, Malcolm Guite’s sonnet “Jesus Meets His Mother,” the Adagio movement of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, the painting Riven Tree by Bruce Herman, and Bifrost Arts’ “Our Song in the Night,” performed by Salina Turner, Allison Negus, and Joel Negus [previously].
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ARTICLE: “6 Musical ‘Passions’ Beyond Bach” by Josh Rodriguez: Composer, professor, and Deus Ex Musica cofounder Josh Rodriguez is an excellent classical music curator and guide. In this article he introduces us to six modern large-scale musical works about Jesus’s final week: The Passion of Yeshua by Richard Danielpour, La Pasión Según San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov, The Passion of the Christ Symphony by John Debney, Johannes-Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina, Simeron by Ivan Moody, and the St. John Passion by James MacMillan. He interweaves composer biography, musical analysis, and meaning in concise ways, with nods to music history. Stylistic influences for these diverse selections range from Byzantine chant to salsa! Audio/video excerpts are provided, such as the cued-up “¿Por qué?” from Golijov’s Pasión (see below), a movement centering on the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with perfume (Mark 14:3–9).
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PRINT SERIES: The Passion and Its Objects (after Dürer) by Marcus Rees Roberts: “The Passion and Its Objects (after Dürer) is a series of etchings and monotypes by Marcus Rees Roberts. The images derive from fragments from Albrecht Dürer’s series of woodcuts The Small Passion (1511). Images of the Passion – and of the crucifixion in particular – are so embedded in Western consciousness that we forget that it is a depiction of betrayal, prejudice, and torture. In this version of the Passion by Dürer, one of several he made, small, everyday objects lie scattered within the images – a jug, pliers, a hammer, a coil of rope. Even five hundred years later, we recognise these objects as our own; we can identify with them. But in so doing, we enter the depicted space, and we become complicit in the cruelty. This is one reason why Dürer’s Small Passion is both so powerful and so uncomfortable.”
Marcus Rees Roberts (British, 1951–), The Passion and Its Objects (after Dürer) I, 2019. Diptych etching and aquatint with chine collé printed on Somerset Satin soft white 300gsm, each plate 29.5 × 21 cm (overall 29.5 × 42 cm). Edition of 15.
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PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES: Passion Play by Deborah Luster: “There are more than 5,300 inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Nearly 4,000 of them are serving life without parole. In 2012 and 2013 the Angola Prison Drama Club staged a play unlike any other in the prison’s experience. The Life of Jesus Christ featured 70 inmates, men and women acting together for the first time—in costume, with a real camel, performing for the general public. For the untrained actors, this production held special meaning as they saw pieces of their own lives revealed in the characters they played.”
Layla “Roach” Roberts (Inquisitor), sentenced to LIFE, Angola Prison, Louisiana. Photograph by Deborah Luster, from the Passion Play series, 2013.Bobby Wallace (Jesus), Angola Prison, Louisiana. Photograph by Deborah Luster, from the Passion Play series, 2013.
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SONGS:
>>“May I Go with You” by January Lim: This Maundy Thursday song was written in 2020 in the voice of Jesus in Gethsemane, speaking to God the Father. In the first stanza, it seems to me that Jesus is asking to be taken up to heaven, like Elijah—just whisked away back to glory, and spared tomorrow’s cruelties and pain. But in the second stanza that same request seems to shift in meaning as Jesus expresses a desire to go with God’s plan and asks for the strength to follow through. The song was released on the EP Gathered Sighs (2021), put out by Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles, where Lim serves as worship arts pastor. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
Sister Kim Ok-soon (김옥순 수녀), The Bread of Life from Heaven (하늘에서 내려온 생명의 빵), 2014
Stars sing, light-years deep in silent space.
In a bottle’s neck God’s Ghost sings
as the wine is poured.
Out on the edge of eternity, the Father
sees the Lamb slain ere the world is formed.
A soft cough splits the silence of this room
light-years below the wheeling stars.
A hollow prayer; give it breath, O Ghost,
let roar a wind like that which shook
the bones in Vision Vale.
For vision, God spills bread crumbs on the board.
His stars sing, light-years deep in silent space.
Here, emblems speak a mystery of brokenness:
the shattering of him by whom all things consist.
Keith Patman is an occasional poet whose primary vocation is Bible translation. Since 1982 he has worked for Wycliffe Bible Translators, assisting with the translation of scripture into the languages of West and Central Africa. He lived in Cameroon from 1987 to 1995, working on a Nugunu New Testament, and now serves from the US as part of an international team providing tools and training to African translators. He currently lives in Waynesboro, Virginia, with his wife, Jaci, who is a Presbyterian minister. They have two grown children and six grandchildren.
Aelbert Bouts (Netherlandish, ca. 1451/54–1549), Man of Sorrows, mid-1490s. Oil on oak wood, 14 15/16 × 10 7/16 in. (37.9 × 26.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ORIGINAL MIDDLE ENGLISH:
Vndo þi dore, my spuse dere,
Allas! wy stond i loken out here?
fre am i þi make.
Loke mi lokkes & ek myn heued
& al my bodi with blod be-weued
For þi sake.
Allas! allas! heuel haue i sped,
For senne iesu is fro me fled,
Mi trewe fere.
With-outen my gate he stant alone,
Sorfuliche he maket his mone
On his manere.
Lord, for senne i sike sore,
Forʒef & i ne wil no more,
With al my mith senne i forsake,
& opne myn herte þe inne to take.
For þin herte is clouen oure loue to kecchen,
Þi loue is chosen vs alle to fecchen;
Mine herte it þerlede ʒef i wer kende,
Þi suete loue to hauen in mende.
Perce myn herte with þi louengge,
Þat in þe i haue my duellingge.
Amen.
MODERN ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
“Undo thy door, my spouse dear,
Alas! why stand I locked out here?
For I am thy mate.
Look, my locks and also my head
And all my body with blood bedewed,
For thy sake.”
“Alas! alas! evil have I sped,
For sin Jesus is from me fled,
My true companion.
Without my gate he standeth alone,
Sorrowfully he maketh his moan
In his manner.”
Lord, for sin I sigh sore,
Forgive, and I’ll do so no more,
With all my might I forsake my sin,
And open my heart to take thee in.
For thy heart is cleft our love to catch,
Thy love has chosen us all to fetch;
My heart it pierced if I were kind,
Thy sweet love to have in mind.
Pierce my heart with thy loving,
That in thee I may have my dwelling.
Amen.
This poem appears in the 1372 “commonplace book” of the Franciscan friar John of Grimestone, who lived in Norfolk, England. Commonplace books were notebooks used to gather quotations and literary excerpts, with entries typically organized under subject headings. Preachers often kept them for homiletic purposes, gathering potential material for sermons. Grimestone’s is remarkable because it includes, in addition to much Latin material, 239 poems in Middle English. (English friars at the time regularly used vernacular religious verse in their sermons.) It is unknown whether Grimestone composed these verses himself or merely compiled them; likely, it is some combination. The first two stanzas of this particular poem are found, transposed, in another manuscript from almost a century earlier. Grimestone revised them slightly and added the third stanza.
Belonging to the Christ-as-lover tradition, “Undo thy door” is based primarily on Song of Solomon 5:2, cited in Grimestone’s manuscript: “I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.” In a clever interpretation of the Old Testament source, the poet imagines the dewdrops on the Beloved’s brow as blood, thus identifying him with the thorn-crowned Christ. His bride is the human soul. Revelation 3:20 is provided as a further gloss by Grimestone: Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”
So in the poem, the speaker is keeping company with sin and has locked out her true lover, Christ. Christ stands at the gate of her heart and implores her with great ardor to let him in and to send sin packing. Wet with the wounds of sacrifice, tokens of his love, he is persistent in his longing for her.
Christ’s entreaties provide the impetus for the speaker’s repentance, expressed in the final stanza, which changes awkwardly in form and meter. His love has pierced her to the core, undoing her resistance. She resolves to break the sin-lock—to turn away from wrongful deeds—and answer Christ’s call so that they can enjoy sweet union together, dwelling in one another’s love. It was his heart that opened first—it was cleft by the centurion’s spear as he hung on the cross—and she is compelled to respond with similar openness, receiving what he has given, requiting his desire.
SOURCES:
This poem is #6108 in the Digital Index of Middle English Verse. It is preserved in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv.MS.18.7.21, fol. 121v. A shorter, earlier version, from the late thirteenth century, appears in London, Lambeth Palace Library 557, fol. 185v.
Modern English translation: David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 85–86
For further reading, see chapters 4–5 of Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially pages 140–41; and chapter 7, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” in Rosemary Woolf, Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval English Literature (London: The Hambledon Press, 1986), especially pages 109–10.
Hélène Mugot (French, 1953–), Du sang et des larmes (Blood and Tears), 2004. Triptych of 300 crystal drops and 200 red glass drops, 350 × 900 cm. Exhibition view from Icare encore at the Mandet Museum, Riom, France, October 22, 2011–January 22, 2012. (Foreground: Pour la gloire… [For the Glory…], 2011.)
When Jesus went out to the garden of Gethsemane to pray the night of his arrest, he pled with the Father to let the cup of suffering pass. Luke says he sweated drops of blood (22:44). He was in agony. He probably dreaded the physical torture he knew was coming, and maybe even more his disciples’ abandoning him. Perhaps he wept for the mother and friends he would leave behind in this next phase of ministry—or, with a mixture of grief and frustration, for the world’s failure to see who he truly was.
Hélène Mugot’s Du sang et des larmes, which translates to Blood and Tears, is an installation of glass pieces made to look like bodily fluids. They hang on the wall in the shape of a three-paneled altarpiece—blood in the center, tears on the wings. The globular forms catch the light from the room and shine.
When Du sang et des larmes was exhibited at the Mandet Museum in 2011, it was part of a larger show of Mugot’s work. On the floor in front of it was her Pour la gloire… (For the Glory…), a menacingly large braided wreath of thick, knotted, blackened vines whose stumps are dotted with red wax of the type used to seal wine bottles—both bandage and wound here, Mugot says. The piece is meant to evoke Jesus’s crown of thorns.
Hélène Mugot (French, 1953–), Pour la gloire… (For the Glory…), 2011. Old vines and red sealing wax, outside diameter 275 cm, height 50 cm. Exhibited at the Mandet Museum, Riom, France, 2011. Photo: Patrick André.
In 2013 Du sang et des larmes joined the collection of the Musée du Hiéron in Paray-le-Monial, France, a museum of Christian art from the Middle Ages to today. There it is staged as the backsplash to a seventeenth-century Virgin and Child statuette carved in wood, thus prompting us to read Christ’s infancy in light of his passion, and vice versa—the Incarnation as a total event, spanning birth to death. (Cue Simeon’s “A sword will pierce your soul . . .”)
Virgin and Child, 17th century; Du sang et des larmes by Hélène Mugot. Collection of the Musée du Hiéron, Paray-le-Monial, France. Photo: Jean-Pierre Gobillot.
To fit the space, the number of droplets and overall size changed slightly from the piece’s first few installations: at the Hiéron there are 311 crystal drops and 267 red glass drops, and the dimensions are 420 × 650 cm.
LISTEN: “Flow, My Tears”by Toivo Tulev, 2007 | Text based on a 1600 air by John Dowland and the Improperia (aka, the Reproaches), a series of antiphons and responses expressing the remonstrance of Jesus Christ with his people | Performed by the Latvian Radio Choir, dir. Kaspars Putniņš, on Tulev: Magnificat, 2018
Flow, my tears, fall from your springs, flow my tears, fall from your . . . Flow my tears, fall from your springs, fall, fall, fall, flow, flow, my tears, flow.
Down, vain lights, shine no more, no nights are dark enough, no lights, shine no more, flow no more, no more. Flow down, vain lights, shine no more, shine you no more.
I led you in a pillar of cloud but you led me to . . . I gave you saving water, but you gave me gall and you gave vinegar. My people, what have I done to you? What have I done to you? Answer me. How have I offended you, you, you? I opened the sea before you, I opened the sea, but you opened my side with a spear.
Flow, flow, flow down. Rain, drop down, cover the ground, drop down, my blood, flow, flow down, drop down, drop down, drop, flow, flow, flow, shine, flow, flow, shine! Flow, my blood, flow, flow, drop, flow down.
My blood spills from your wounds, drop, drop, drop, your wounds, flow, flow, flow down, flow, shine, drop, flow. Flow my tears, fall from your springs, flow, my blood. My blood, my blood spills from your wounds, my wounds, my blood, flow, blood, flow, flow, shine! Spills from your wounds my blood, shine! My wounds, my wounds, drop down, shine! From your, from my wounds, shine! Flow, drop down, shine! Flow, shine! My, your blood, shine!
My blood, flow, shine, flow, shine! shine! Fall, shine, fall, shine, fall from your . . . flow, fall . . . Shine! Shine! [source]
Toivo Tulev is an Estonian composer born in 1958. In this choral composition for twelve solo voices, he has combined words from a secular Renaissance lute song and the Christian Holy Week liturgy. It’s ponderous and grating, capturing well Jesus’s psychological affliction.
While in the first half the speaker, Jesus, wishes for light to “shine no more” so that he be left alone in darkness, that imperative eventually evolves into the affirmative: “Shine!” Blood: shine! Tears: shine! Tulev’s clever manipulation of his lyrical source material creates allusions to the glory, the illumination, that is to come. Paradoxically, when the sun is eclipsed from noon to three on the day of crucifixion, God’s love shines brighter than ever.
One line that stands out to me is “My blood spills from your wounds.” Who is the “your”? Earlier Jesus is talking to his people, but I interpret a shift here to God the Father as the addressee. Even though he sees through to the other side, he, too, is tremendously pained by what is unfolding—his only Son, killed. It’s as if Jesus’s wounds are his own (much like any parent would tell you, when their child is suffering). The unity of these two persons of the Godhead in the poetry of this song is really beautiful. Their heart is one.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
—Isaiah 53:5
LOOK: Cuts by Johannes Phokela
Johannes Phokela (South African, 1966–), Cuts, 1990. Acrylic and string on canvas, 83 1/16 × 83 1/16 in. (211 × 211 cm). Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.
For this gruesome artwork, Johannes Phokela slashed a canvas in many spots with a razor, then stitched up the gashes with heavy string. He then painted over the gashes from the back with crimson paint until it bled through, forming a deep red along the seams and a flesh-pink further out, evocative of scar tissue. Then, as if to memorialize the wounds, he painted twenty gold frames over them in rows of five across and four down.
Phokela often uses painted frames or grids as a compositional device in his work. “The grid gives another dimension to the work; it is a device to challenge the viewer’s perception of the image and form beneath,” he said in a 2002 interview with Bruce Haines. “It is intended to have an effect like an ornamental frame surrounding a mirror, or a glass pane mounting a picture. . . . You have to regard it as part of the work, just like the traditional frame of a painting. . . . It gives the work a sort of focal point that can stimulate the viewer’s reaction.”
I was simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by this painting when I saw it exhibited as part of Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue at the Smithsonian in 2014. It is large—almost seven square feet. From a distance the image looks rather rose-like, a concentric arrangement of short red lines slightly curled like petals. It wasn’t until I got closer that I saw it portrays the vulnerability of human flesh, savagely torn.
When I’m at an art museum I like to look at each artwork before reading its label so that I can register my initial impressions and begin to form an interpretation before I receive the curator’s. (I hope you do the same when you encounter artworks on this website!) When I saw this one, I thought of how Christ was wounded for our transgressions, but those wounds became his glory—and ours. In art history Jesus is sometimes shown with light emanating from the holes in his hands, especially in images where he is exalted in heaven. For me, the gold in Cuts suggests a redemptive framework—like it’s asking us to view the horrors of the cross through the lens of glory. In addition, the gold frames within the picture plane seem to emphasize that these wounds are something worthy of being looked at, even meditated upon, as frames show us what’s important, directing our gaze.
Well, here’s what the label said:
On a trip home to South Africa in 1989, Phokela was distressed to see the state of violence that existed as a result of political rivalry and unrest. Disturbed by the bandaged and scarred faces and bodies of his fellow citizens and by the fact that everyone seemed to accept the situation as normal, the artist created a canvas of cuts overlaid with gold frames to distance himself from the violence.
So, Phokela, a Black South African who was born and raised in Soweto but had been living in London since 1987, painted this as a response to the violence of apartheid in his home country. Whoever wrote this text sees the frames as putting us at further remove from the cuts that are represented, as they form an intervening layer between us and them. A legitimate reading, though I haven’t found any statements from Phokela that express this intent. What I did find from him regarding his use of frames in general, I quoted above.
Having learned the particular context out of which this painting arose, I then considered what Jesus’s crucifixion has to say to human suffering today. What relevance has a Galilean man’s torture and execution two thousand years ago to present-day men and women who are beaten and abused?—in this case, because of their race.
Jesus’s death exposed and put to shame the powers of evil, those which assault God and God’s image-bearers. Surely there was much more going on with his death than just that (whole volumes, whole series of volumes, have been written to articulate a theology of the cross). But bringing to light the crimes of humanity—and at the same time, God’s supreme love—is one aspect. Opening up pathways of transformation, healing, reconciliation, and liberation is another.
LISTEN: “By His Wounds” by Bifrost Arts, feat. DM Stith, on He Will Not Cry Out, 2013 | Words by Isaac Wardell, 2011 | Music by Philip Hayes, 1786
By his wounds, his wounds, will we be healed And for our transgressions, his passion has made us well Let us come again and feed on him, our Lord Emmanuel
This melody was originally written in the eighteenth century by English composer, organist, singer, and conductor Philip Hayes (1738–1797), who published it in The Muses’ Delight: Catches, Glees, Canzonets, and Canons as a round setting of Psalm 137:1–2 (“By the waters of Babylon . . .”). The song became widely popular after Don McLean recorded it on his 1971 album American Pie and even more so in 2007, when it was used in a memorable montage in the TV series Mad Men.
Isaac Wardell, cofounder of the Bifrost Arts music collective and now director of The Porter’s Gate, put different words to Hayes’s melody in 2011, retaining the canon form. The first two lines reference the well-known Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah 53, and the last is an invitation to come to the Lord’s table—to take in unto ourselves the body and blood of Christ.
Edgar G. Boevé (American, 1929–2019), Phoenix, Death, ca. 1980. Oil and acrylic on tea chest paper. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones, at the Center Art Gallery, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2015.
Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss, That yields, that streams, that pours, that doth distill; Untilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press, Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will! Thus Christ prevents, unforced, in shedding blood, The whips, the thorns, the nails, the spear, and rood.
He pelican’s, he phoenix’, fate doth prove, Whom flames consume, whom streams enforce to die: How burneth blood, how bleedeth burning love? Can one in flame and stream both bathe and fry? How could he join a phoenix’ fiery pains, In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins?
Elias once, to prove God’s sovereign power, By prayer procured a fire of wondrous force That blood and wood and water did devour, Yea stones and dust beyond all nature’s course: Such fire is love, that, fed with gory blood, Doth burn no less than in the driest wood.
O sacred fire! come, show thy force on me, That sacrifice to Christ I may return: If withered wood for fuel fittest be, If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will burn, I withered am, and stony to all good, A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.
Note: I modernized the spellings of this poem for readability, but there is a beauty to the early modern English; see the original here.
Robert Southwell (ca. 1561–1595) was an English Catholic priest and poet living during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Educated at Jesuit colleges in France and Italy, he returned to his native England as a missionary in 1586. But he suffered persecution under the country’s Protestant regime, and had to conduct his ministry in concealment. In his early thirties he was caught celebrating the Mass and was subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and hanged for treason. None of his English poems was published in his lifetime, but many of them circulated as manuscripts. He probably wrote this one sometime during his three years in the Tower of London, awaiting execution.
“Christ’s Bloody Sweat” opens with a reflection on Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane the night before the Crucifixion, when “in his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44). This bloody sweat may be a figure of speech Luke uses to convey the intensity of the moment, or it may be an actual condition called hematidrosis, in which capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing them to exude blood—something that can occur in rare cases when a person is under extreme physical or emotional stress.
In the first stanza of the poem, “Southwell introduces various fluids that represent the creative effusions of Christ’s love, with an extravagant reiteration of images that emphasises the extravagance of that love,” writes Rev. Patrick Comerford in his commentary on the poem.
Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss, That yields, that streams, that pours, that doth distill; Untilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press, Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will! Thus Christ prevents, unforced, in shedding blood, The whips, the thorns, the nails, the spear, and rood.
Southwell describes Christ as rich, fertile soil that yields sweet fruit; a spring of living water; an olive from which consecrated oil is distilled (for the anointing of the newly baptized and newly ordained); and a grape that yields fine wine. It may help you to read each phrase vertically down the first four lines: “Fat soil that yields, untilled, dear fruit”; “full spring that streams, undrawn, clear brooks”; “sweet olive that pours, unstamped, fair oil”; “grape of bliss that doth distill, untouched of press, sweet wine at will!”
“Prevent” in this context means to go before. In other words, even before Jesus is captured by the Roman soldiers, tortured, and led to Calvary to be crucified, he sheds his blood in Gethsemane. Without any physical forces acting upon him. “Rood” is an archaic word for the cross.
Stanza 2 references two birds of lore that were popular symbols of Christ: the pelican and the phoenix.
He pelican’s, he phoenix’, fate doth prove, Whom flames consume, whom streams enforce to die: How burneth blood, how bleedeth burning love? Can one in flame and stream both bathe and fry? How could he join a phoenix’ fiery pains, In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins?
The pelican was said (by Epiphanius, Augustine, and other church fathers) to revive or feed her young with her own blood; she would peck at her breast until she died so that her little ones might have life. The phoenix is a fantastical bird from classical mythology that burns itself to ashes on a funeral pyre ignited by the sun but then rises up out of those ashes, renewed.
Southwell ponders how Christ can be both pelican and phoenix. Did he bleed to death (losing streams of blood), or did he die by burning? The image in line 10 is quite gruesome: Christ simultaneously is “bathe[d]” in blood and fries in flames. The fire is, of course, metaphoric. But it becomes here, along with the blood, an emblem of divine love. A love that bleeds and burns, and that is all-consuming.
The fire and blood imagery continues in stanza 3, where Southwell refers to the famous contest on Mount Carmel between Elijah (a prophet of Yahweh) and the prophets of Baal (see 1 Kings 18).
Elias once, to prove God’s sovereign power, By prayer procured a fire of wondrous force That blood and wood and water did devour, Yea stones and dust beyond all nature’s course: Such fire is love, that, fed with gory blood, Doth burn no less than in the driest wood.
To prove the supremacy of the God of Israel over Baal, Elijah issues a challenge. He and Baal’s prophets would each prepare a bull for sacrifice and lay it on a stone altar but light no fire. They would then pray each to their own god and see which god answers by sending fire from heaven to consume their sacrifice. The prophets of Baal accept the challenge, but no fire comes to light their altar, despite their most fervent entreaties. Elijah, to increase the stakes, even soaks his bull and the wood it lies on in water, three times over—and still fire comes from above, devouring, as Southwell writes, “blood and wood and water . . . [and] stones and dust beyond all nature’s course.”
God’s love is like that fire, Southwell says. The implication, I think, is that on the cross, the love of the Son (who gives himself as a sacrifice) and the love of the Father (who accepts the sacrifice) meet. (I know there are varying interpretations of the nature of the atonement and the role of the Father in the Crucifixion, but I’m simply trying to interpret Southwell here.)
In the poem’s final stanza, Southwell considers how he ought to respond to divine love as expressed in Christ’s passion.
O sacred fire! come, show thy force on me, That sacrifice to Christ I may return: If withered wood for fuel fittest be, If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will burn, I withered am, and stony to all good, A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.
He calls on God to accept, in return, his sacrifice—of praise and thanksgiving and obedience (Heb. 13:15–16; Ps. 50:23) and of his very self (Rom. 12:1–2). He probably had his martyrdom in mind. He acknowledges that he is but a withered, soggy, stony-hearted “sack of dust” but prays that God would make him fit to receive and broadcast the fire of love from on high.
Christ Nailed to the Cross, mola (reverse appliqué panel) from the San Blas Islands, late 20th century. Bowden Collections.
The Kuna (also spelled Guna or Cuna) Indians live on the San Blas archipelago off the east coast of Panama, a cluster of some 378 islands in the Caribbean Sea. They are politically autonomous, and much of their traditional culture is intact.
Since the late nineteenth century, Kuna women have been making what are called molas, reverse appliqué panels made in pairs for the front and back of women’s blouses. As mola collector Jane Gruver describes, “several layers of cloth are stacked together and the design is made by cutting through the different layers of fabric to expose the desired color. Once the specific shape is achieved, the area is stitched around. Sometimes embroidery and applique are also used to add detail.” This colorful, wearable textile art is an integral part of Kuna culture.
The earliest molas featured geometric designs, which the Kunas translated from their customary body painting designs, but now a vast variety of representational subjects are common, including animals, plants, domestic scenes, political satire, dragons, mermaids, superheroes, spacecraft—and biblical stories!
The first Christian missionary to the San Blas Islands was Annie Coope, a single woman from the United States who arrived in the first decade of the 1900s and established a school on the island of Nirgana in 1913. A significant number of the Kuna embraced Christianity, such that there are now churches on thirty of the islands, as well as eighteen Kuna churches in and around Panama City, according to Wycliffe. A Kuna translation of the New Testament was published in 1995, at the behest of Kuna pastor Lino Smith Arango, and a Kuna Old Testament was completed in 2014.
The mola above shows two men hammering nails into Christ’s palms as two mourning figures—presumably John and Mary—stand behind. This piece is from the collection of Sandra and Bob Bowden in Chatham, Massachusetts, who are among today’s major collectors of modern biblical art. It is one of forty molas in the traveling exhibition Eden to Eternity: Molas from the San Blas Islands, available for rental for a nominal fee.
Fernando Botero (Colombian, 1932–), Cabeza de Cristo (Head of Christ), 1976. Oil on canvas, 185 × 179 cm. Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia.
Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero is South America’s best-known artist. He is influenced by the Old Masters, which he studied in his twenties in Madrid, Paris, and Florence, and by the Mexican muralists. But his style—marked by plump, often childlike figures—is distinctively his own and has even been given the name “Boterismo.”
Throughout his career he has remained adamant that he does not paint “fat people” or “chubbies.” What he paints, he insists, is exaggerated volumes that highlight the body’s natural shape and the “sensuality of form.” In addition to religious subjects, he also paints Latin American street scenes, domestic life, nudes, and political portraits.
At age eighty-nine, Botero continues to be active as an artist, living and working between Paris, New York, and Tuscany.
LISTEN: “Legend (The Crown of Roses),” Op. 54, No. 5, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1883/89 | Based on a text by Richard Henry Stoddard, 1856 | Performed by the University of Pretoria Camerata, dir. Michael Barrett, on Written in the Stars, 2021
When Jesus Christ was yet a child He had a garden small and wild, Wherein he cherished roses fair, And wove them into garlands there.
Now once, as summer-time drew nigh, There came a troop of children by, And seeing roses on the tree, With shouts they plucked them merrily.
“Do you bind roses in your hair?” They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there. The Boy said humbly: “Take, I pray, All but the naked thorns away.”
Then of the thorns they made a crown, And with rough fingers pressed it down. Till on his forehead fair and young Red drops of blood like roses sprung.
In 1877 Tchaikovsky found a Russian poem by Aleksey Pleshcheyev published in a journal; it was a translation of the English-language poem “Roses and Thorns” (1856) by American poet Richard Henry Stoddard, an allegory of the Crucifixion. It’s about the boy Jesus who tends a rose garden and dreamily weaves together crowns from the branches’ yield. One day a bunch of rowdy children comes by and carelessly yanks the flowers off the bushes, scoffing at Jesus for being soft, a flower lover. In a spirit of gentleness, he tells them they may have the flowers, but to leave the thorns. Continuing their derision, the children bend the bare, thorny stems into a crown and press it into Jesus’s head. From his flesh then bloom “roses” of blood.
Tchaikovsky first set the Russian poem to music in 1883, arranging it for solo voice and piano and publishing it as part of his Sixteen Songs for Children, Opus 54. In 1884 he arranged it for solo voice and orchestra, and in 1889 for unaccompanied choir.
When English-language choirs sing the song, instead of using Stoddard’s original text, they typically use a 1913 adaptation by British poet Geoffrey Dearmer—which I believe is the superior version. See a side-by-side presentation of the song’s textual history.
Art & Theology 