Lyrics
Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.
O hope of every contrite heart,
O joy of all the meek,
To those who fall, how kind Thou art!
How good to those who seek!
But what to those who find? Ah, this
Nor tongue nor pen can show;
The love of Jesus, what it is,
None but His loved ones know.
Jesus, our only joy be Thou,
As Thou our prize wilt be;
Jesus, be Thou our glory now,
And through eternity.
Public domain hymn text (1849 (English translation)). Words by Edward Caswall, after Bernard of Clairvaux.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Like ‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’, this hymn’s underlying text is traditionally attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, the highly influential twelfth-century French Cistercian abbot and theologian.
Exactly as with that other hymn, though, modern scholars studying the question closely now generally regard the precise original authorship of the underlying medieval Latin poem as genuinely uncertain, rather than firmly established fact.
Edward Caswall was an English clergyman who, much like John Henry Newman, author of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, personally converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism and subsequently joined Newman’s own religious community, the Birmingham Oratory.
Caswall translated the original Latin text into its now-familiar English form in 1849. He did so as part of a considerably broader, sustained personal project of deliberately bringing a wide range of ancient Latin hymn texts into regular English-language congregational worship for the first time.
Caswall personally translated a substantial number of separate medieval Latin hymns during his many years of dedicated work at the Oratory. This particular hymn remains today one of his single most widely sung and lastingly successful English translations.
It is valued especially and specifically for its deliberately simple, unhurried, meditative focus on the mere thought of Christ’s own name, functioning by itself as a genuine and sufficient source of inward comfort — notably independent of any specific accompanying request, petition, or expressed personal need being separately voiced anywhere else within the hymn’s own text. That is a rare quality of pure, unrequesting contemplation, one that sets it apart from many more overtly petitionary hymns found elsewhere throughout this same broader hymnal collection.
