Lyrics
O sacred Head, now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown;
O sacred Head, what glory,
What bliss till now was Thine!
Yet, though despised and gory,
I joy to call Thee mine.
What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered
Was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior!
‘Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor,
Vouchsafe to me Thy grace.
What language shall I borrow
To thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever,
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never
Outlive my love to Thee.
Be near when I am dying,
O show Thy cross to me!
And, for my succor flying,
Come, Lord, to set me free:
These eyes, new faith receiving,
From Thee shall never move;
For he who dies believing
Dies safely in Thy love.
Public domain hymn text (1830 (English translation)). Words by James W. Alexander, after Paul Gerhardt and Bernard of Clairvaux.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn’s text traces its origins back to a medieval Latin poem, traditionally, though not entirely conclusively, attributed to the influential twelfth-century monastic writer and theologian Bernard of Clairvaux.
Modern scholarly consensus generally now considers the actual original authorship of that underlying Latin text genuinely uncertain — quite possibly the work of a different, now entirely unknown medieval writer working within the same general devotional tradition.
The German hymn writer Paul Gerhardt subsequently translated and creatively adapted a specific portion of the longer original Latin poem into German, sometime during the 1650s.
Considerably later still, the American Presbyterian minister James W. Alexander further translated Gerhardt’s own German version into the specific English text now most commonly sung in churches today, publishing his English translation in 1830.
The hymn’s accompanying tune was originally composed as an entirely secular love song, by the German composer Hans Leo Hassler, sometime around 1600. It was only considerably later adapted for use with this specific sacred text.
The resulting pairing eventually became so closely and permanently associated with one another that the composer J.S. Bach himself made deliberate use of variations on this exact same underlying melody on five separate distinct occasions, throughout his monumental choral work the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ That major musical composition, retelling the full crucifixion narrative, remains to this day widely considered one of the single most significant individual works within the entire history of Western sacred music.
The hymn’s genuinely layered compositional and translation history spans an uncertain medieval Latin original of disputed authorship, followed by a seventeenth-century German poetic adaptation, followed in turn by a nineteenth-century English translation. All of that was eventually paired together with a tune originally composed for a completely secular, non-religious purpose, entirely unrelated to its eventual sacred use.
That makes it one of the most extensively reworked and multiply transformed individual hymn texts, crossing several distinct centuries and several different European languages in succession, found anywhere within this entire hymnal collection.
