Hail, Holy Queen: the full text and where “valley of tears” comes from
The prayer
Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.
In short
Hail, Holy Queen is the Marian antiphon said at the end of the rosary and sung in the Liturgy of the Hours. The Latin text dates from the eleventh or twelfth century and its authorship is disputed. It calls Mary our advocate and asks her to intercede — and asks nothing else of her.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 7 min read
When to pray it
At the end of the rosary, after the fifth decade, and at night: in the Liturgy of the Hours it is one of the antiphons that close the day. It is also the traditional prayer said at a deathbed.
The prayer is built of two unequal parts. The first is a lament: we cry, we sigh, mourning and weeping. The second is a request, and the request is not for the pain to stop — it is that eyes be turned, and that Jesus be shown. Nothing in this antiphon promises the end of the exile; it asks for company inside it.
“Poor banished children of Eve” is the line that jars most today, and it is the key to the text. A banished person is someone expelled and living away from home. The prayer starts from the premise that this world is not the final destination, and that premise is what makes the rest of it work: people who feel at home do not ask to be shown the way.
The centre of the prayer is a request to see, not to be rescued. “Show unto us Jesus” is the only imperative with a concrete object, and it redirects everything: the titles, the lament, the advocacy all empty out into someone who is not Mary.
The threefold ending, “O clement, O loving, O sweet”, adds no content. It is music: the antiphon was written to be sung, and those three invocations are where the Gregorian melody opens out. Anyone who has heard the Salve Regina sung in a monastery recognises the passage before understanding the words.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Eleventh or twelfth century, in Latin, authorship disputed
The Salve Regina is one of the four Marian antiphons of the Roman office — the chants with which each season of the year closes the last hour of the day. It appears in manuscripts from the twelfth century onwards, chiefly in Cistercian sources, and spreads quickly from there. The Dominicans were singing it in procession after Compline as early as the thirteenth century, and it is from that practice that the now universal custom of ending the rosary with it descends.
The authorship is unsettled and will probably stay that way. The attribution repeated most often is to Hermann of Reichenau, an eleventh-century German monk known as Hermann the Lame, who lived with a severe disability and to whom treatises on music and astronomy are also credited; another tradition names Adhemar of Le Puy. Neither claim rests on a contemporary document, and the text remains, in practice, anonymous.
The wording changed too. The three final invocations — “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary” — are credited by a late tradition to Bernard of Clairvaux, who is said to have added them aloud on hearing the antiphon in a cathedral. The story is a good one and has no contemporary record; the invocations already stand in early manuscripts of the text.
Little-known details
“Valley of tears” came through Latin, and Bibles made from Hebrew do not have the phrase
It was said at the end of every Low Mass for eighty years
“Advocate” is courtroom vocabulary, and the choice is deliberate
It belongs to one season, not to the whole year
What the passages say
26Therefore, when Jesus had seen his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.”
27Next, he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.” And from that hour, the disciple accepted her as his own.
The scene at the cross that Marian devotion leans on most often. The text is short and explains nothing: Jesus entrusts his mother to the disciple and the disciple to his mother. It is over the reach of that entrusting that the Christian traditions differ.
1And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve stars.
The image behind the title of queen, with its crown of twelve stars. Notice what the chapter does with the figure immediately afterwards: she flees into the desert and is pursued — the older reading identifies her with the people of God, and the Marian one came later.
6Blessed is the man whose help is from you. In his heart, he is disposed to ascend
7from the valley of tears, from the place which he has determined.
The source of “valley of tears”, and note the chapter number: the CPDV follows the Vulgate’s numbering, so this is the psalm printed as 84 in the Portuguese and Spanish editions here. Those two, translated from Hebrew, call the valley Baca; this one calls it tears, and the prayer inherited the Latin reading.
5For there is one God, and one mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus,
The verse the evangelical reading rests on when it directs all prayer to God alone through Christ. It is here because this page does not hide the question the word “advocate” raises: both readings stand side by side in the note below.