Let’s start off with the lyrics. Set to 3/4, Lạy Mẹ xin yên ủi [Prayer to Our Lady for comfort] begins with the chorus, asking for comfort by the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Lạy Mẹ xin yên ủi chúng con luôn luôn
Mẹ từ bi xin phá những nỗi u buồn
Vì đời con gieo rắc biết bao đau thương
Và tràn lan gai góc vướng trên con đường.

We pray to Our Lady to comforts us always.
Merciful Mother, please break away our sorrows.
For our lives have sown too much pain and hurt,
Like thorny plants spreading all over a road.

The first verse references three different things: Marian apparitions (Lourdes? La Vang? modern apparitions in general?); her quiet demeanor after the birth of Jesus, as if projecting that she had somehow known that he was bound for a painful death in the future; and that she has “received the power.” The line doesn’t indicate what type of power, but it’s probably the power to intercede to her son and to God.

Ơ Mẹ rất nhân từ Mẹ quên sao được hôm xưa,
Lời mẹ hứa khi ở trên núi kia.
Lúc mà Chúa sinh thì Mẹ đứng âu sầu lặng yên,
Là Mẹ chúng con mẹ xin lĩnh quyền.

Compassionate Mother, you wouldn’t have forgotten back then
When you made the promise on the mount.
[Or] when the Lord was born, you stood quiet with sorrow inside.
You have received the power as our Mother.

The second verse asks her to help one be pure and holy in this lifetime so one could faithfully worship Jesus Christ.

Khấn Mẹ giữ linh hồn và xác con hằng trinh trong
Lòng luôn hớn hở hát khen Nữ Vương
Quyết còn sống ngày nào thờ kính Con mẹ khoan nhân
Và không quyến luyến thú vui thế trần

We pray that Our Lady keep our soul and body pure,
Our hearts always sing praises of the Queen,
As long as we breathe, we worship your compassionate Son,
Without being drawn to earthly pleasures.

The third and last verse asks for her comfort at one’s hour of death in the hope of being with her in the afterlife.

Đến giờ chết xin Mẹ ngự đến bên giường khuyên con
Và ban xuống cho chúng con những ơn
Ước gì chúng con được hầu sát ngay cạnh Mẹ luôn
Từ nay hết lo lắng hết chán phiền

At the hour of death, please, Mother, be at our bed
Giving us blessings from above,
We wish that we will be always right next to Our Lady,
And have no worries and frustration from now on.

The composer of this popular Marian hymn was Nguyễn Khắc Xuyên, who wrote the lyrics for the popular Christmas hymn Cao cung lên [Raise the octave]. He was a student at the Lasallian school Puginier in Hanoi then attended a minor seminary where his interest in liturgical music deepened. Lạy Mẹ xin yên ủi was the first hymn that he completed. It is among his best known compositions, including another Marian hymn called Trên con đường về quê [On the way home].Both

Now to the question: Is this hymn about Our Lady of Perpetual Help?

The textual evidence isn’t clear that the hymn has anything to do with OLPH. Had the opening phrase been Lạy Mẹ xin cứu giúp chúng con luôn luôn: We pray, Mother, for helping us always, the answer would be probably. But it is yên ủi rather than cứu giúp, making her Our Lady of Perpetual Comfort rather than Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

I compared the lyrics to prayers found in a devotional book about Our Lady of Perpetual Help published by the Redemptorists in the late 1930s. Such prayers had already circulated among the faithful by Canadian missionaries since their arrival to Indochina in 1925. Although it’s not clear if Nguyễn Khắc Xuyên was associated with the Redemptorists, he was in all likelihood exposed in some capacity and to some extent to Our Lady of Perpetual Help by 1944, when he wrote this hymn.

All the same, my comparison of lyrics and prayers to OLPH doesn’t yield any clear connection. For example, the OLPH painting is referenced in some of the French and Latin hymns that were in turn translated or adapted to Vietnamese. Here is an example of such a hymn.

The verses in the French hymn above call the object of devotion image sainte: holy image. Similarly, the book contains Vietnamese verses sung to the melody above or another European hymn–and each of the verses make a reference to ảnh rất lành: most blessed picture.

How about any of the many spoken prayers in this book? Here, too, I recognized few if any common phrases between OLPH prayers and the hymn’s lyrics. This is an area that word-recognition AI may be very beneficial. In any event, there are echoes in some of the phrases (such as on the page below) that I couldn’t let go the possibility that Nguyễn Khắc Xuyên was partially inspired by OLPH devotionalism.

In the end, it is probably not relevant all that much whether this hymn was inspired by the OLPH. A lot more important was the Marian landscape in the late colonial era, in which OLPH co-existed among other kinds of Marian devotionalism: Our Lady of La Vang, Our Lady of Lourdes, and the emergent Our Lady of Fatima. It was this landscape that inspired Lạy Mẹ xin yên ủi and other Marian hymns written from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s when Vietnam was divided into two halves.