Ave Maria, blessed Maid

Ave Maria, blessed Maid. John Keble. [B. V. M.] This hymn is taken from John Keble's poem for "The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary," comprising stanzas 7 through 10. The original poem was composed on the occasion of the death of his mother on June 1, 1823, a poignant personal event that provides the key to the line of thought in the opening stanza: "Oh! Thou Who deign'st to sympathize / With all our frail and fleshly ties, / Maker, yet Brother dear. / Forgive the too presumptuous thought, / If, calming wayward grief, I sought / To gaze on Thee too near."

Because the poem as originally written was deemed too personal for public devotional use in The Christian Year, Keble revised it on March 9, 1826. He omitted the four concluding stanzas of the original manuscript and substituted the stanzas beginning "Ave Maria, blessed Maid," which form the conclusion in that work. The poem in this revised form was first published in The Christian Year in 1827. The original unrevised manuscript version was later published with an explanatory note in Keble's Miscellaneous Poems in 1869 (pages 230 to 233). Meanwhile, the cento beginning with "Ave Maria, blessed Maid" was extracted and adopted as a congregational hymn, appearing in the Appendix to the Hymnal Noted (second edition, 1864), the People's Hymnal (1867, No. 192), and several other prominent nineteenth-century hymn collections.