The Stabat Mater begins as a picture, the sorrowful mother standing in tears beside the cross while her son hangs on it, her grieving soul pierced by the sword old Simeon had promised. For its first third the poem only looks, asking who could fail to weep seeing the mother of Christ in such torment. Then it turns, and the remaining stanzas are addressed to Mary directly, in a chain of petitions almost shocking in their intimacy, make me feel the force of your grief, make me weep with you, fix the wounds of the crucified deep in my heart, let me stand beside the cross with you and join you freely in your mourning, and at the end, when my body dies, let my soul be given the glory of paradise. It is passion devotion in the Franciscan manner, seeking not to understand the cross but to feel it, and its origin lies in that thirteenth century Franciscan world.
The common ascription is to Jacopone da Todi, the lawyer turned wild Franciscan penitent poet, though manuscripts do not secure it and Pope Innocent III and others have been proposed. Long used as a devotional text, it was admitted to the Roman missal as a liturgical sequence only in 1727, for the feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, and it is also sung stanza by stanza between the Stations of the Cross.