When I Survey The Wondrous Cross: A Song History
The English hymn writer Isaac Watts published "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs of 1707.[1] It sat in the book's third section, a group of hymns written for the Lord's Supper, so it began life as a meditation for the moment before Communion.[2][3] Watts himself reworded part of the opening stanza for the second edition of 1709.[2] A vivid original fourth stanza about Christ's blood is usually left out of hymnals, and the hymn's theme of boasting only in the cross echoes Galatians 6:14.[1][2][3] It has since been printed in more than 2,000 hymnals, and the hymnologist John Julian ranked it among the four foremost hymns in the English language.[1]
Francesco Bartolozzi, Dr. Isaac Watts, 1779, etching and engraving. Yale Center for British Art. Public domain.
The text is in long meter (8.8.8.8), so more than one tune fits it.[4] Hymnary.org names HAMBURG as the tune most commonly used with it. The American composer Lowell Mason wrote it in 1824 and published it the next year in his Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music.[1][4] Mason indicated that he based it on a Gregorian chant, and the melody uses only five pitches, a plainness Hymnary.org credits with keeping the focus on the text.[4] The older alternative is ROCKINGHAM, which the English composer Edward Miller adapted in 1790 from an earlier tune and named for his patron, the Marquis of Rockingham, twice Britain's prime minister.[5] It was first matched with Watts's words in 1861 and has long been linked to them in both Britain and North America; the folk melody O WALY WALY is also used.[3][5][1]
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