O Vos Omnes
1:
O VOS OMNES From the Vg, O vos omnes qui transitis per viam (“O you who pass by the way”) is found in Lam. 1:12, and in context it represents the mourning of Jerusalem for her having been laid waste (cf. 1:1: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was once full of people!”). This passage became part of the medieval liturgy, and the speaker of it is understood typologically to be Christ or Mary: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow …” (KJV). In various English liturgies it has been part of the liturgy for Holy Week; in the first and second Prayer Books of Edward VI the entire chapter was established as the lection for evensong of Maundy Thursday. The Franciscans, who emphasized spiritual identification with the Passion of Christ, wrote vernacularizations of this passage, especially in its liturgical rendering, and were fond of preaching on the theme, as many notes in the Fasciculus Morum attest. The 14th-cent. English Franciscan John Lathbury wrote a commentary on Lamentations sprinkled with verse and containing a discussion of Jeremiah’s versification. Influenced also by the sermons of St. Anthony, Domenica II in Quadragesima (1.91a), he compares the mourning city to the mater dolorosa of the Crucifixion scene. English Friar John Grimestone offers a typical English versification, in which Christ speaks from the cross to “passers-by”:
ʒe þat pasen by þe weyʒe,
Abidet a litel stounde!
Be-holdet, al mi felawes,
ʒef ani me lik is founde.
To þe tre with nailes þre
Wol fast i hange bounde,
With a spere al þoru mi side
To min herte is mad a wounde. (C. Brown, ed. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, no. 74)
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
