From the same sources no doubt spring as well most of the variations of text in the manuscripts.
The first of the poems is chiefly a conversation between the Lord on the cross and his mother standing at its foot.

A few prefatory remarks in explanation of some of its allusions will help my readers to enjoy it.
It was at one time a common belief, and the notion has not yet, I think, altogether vanished, that the dying are held back from repose by the love that is unwilling to yield them up.

Hence, in the third stanza, the Lord prays his mother to let him die.

In the fifth, he reasons against her overwhelming sorrows on the ground of the deliverance his sufferings will bring to the human race.

But she can only feel her own misery.
To understand the seventh and eighth, it is necessary to know that, among other strange things accepted by the early Church, it was believed that the mother of Jesus had no suffering at his birth.