Jerusalem the golden,
With milk and honey blest,
Beneath thy contemplation
Sink heart and voice oppressed.
I know not, oh, I know not,
What social joys are there,
What radiancy of glory,
What light beyond compare.
They stand, those halls of Zion,
All jubilant with song,
And bright with many an angel,
And all the martyr throng;
The Prince is ever in them,
The daylight is serene;
The pastures of the blessed
Are decked in glorious sheen.
There is the throne of David;
And there, from care released,
The shout of them that triumph,
The song of them that feast;
And they who with their Leader
Have conquered in the fight,
Forever and forever
Are clad in robes of white.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (1858 (English translation)). Words by John Mason Neale, after Bernard of Cluny.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's text is drawn from a much longer twelfth-century Latin poem, roughly three thousand lines in total, written by a monk known to history only as Bernard of Cluny (or Bernard of Morlaix), about whom almost nothing else is reliably known beyond his association with the great monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, France, then one of the most influential religious institutions in all of Western Europe.
Bernard's original poem, titled 'De Contemptu Mundi' ('On Contempt for the World'), was in fact largely a bitter, extended satirical attack on the corruption, greed, and moral failure Bernard perceived among the clergy of his own era, written in a famously difficult Latin verse form requiring internal rhyme within each line as well as end rhyme, a technical achievement widely admired by later scholars of medieval Latin poetry. Only a comparatively small portion of the original poem, describing heaven by deliberate contrast with the corrupted earth Bernard spent most of the poem condemning, forms the basis of this hymn.
John Mason Neale, already responsible elsewhere in this collection for translating 'Art Thou Weary, Art Thou Languid' (hymn 115) and 'Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation' (hymn 120), translated this portion of Bernard's poem into English in 1858, extracting only the positive, heaven-focused sections and leaving behind the bulk of Bernard's original satirical condemnation of medieval church corruption.
The resulting hymn, stripped of its original polemical context, functions purely as an extended meditation on the singer's own present inability to fully imagine heaven's joy — 'I know not, oh, I know not, what social joys are there' — an admission of limitation rather than confident description, drawn from a twelfth-century poem originally written mostly to condemn the very human failures that made heaven's promised perfection feel, to Bernard, so urgently necessary to hope for.
