References and Abbreviations

A. Claudian and Boethius

Lack of literary vitality must show itself conspicuously in poetry. Claudian[1] at the end of the fourth century is typical of the fashionable versified rhetoric. Poet of those who taught and quoted Vergil, but liked Lucan and Statius, he is imitative fluently, prettily, and, except for a certain monotony, expertly. His Raptus Proserpinæ had the longer life, doubtless, because the abundant allusions and decorative descriptions give literary atmosphere without taxing either memory or imagination, and because, though diffuse, it is briefer than much verse narrative current in its time. Most of Claudian’s other poems were occasional, and faded with the occasion.

But the old modes, for all the trivial use of them, were not spent. Boethius[2] showed himself here too the last of the Romans. The man who interpreted to century after century the logic of Aristotle was a poet. Not only is the Consolatio philosophiæ poetic in conception; its lyric interludes are so far above the facile expertness of the time as to suggest comparison with the best Latin achievement. Nothing less was the inspiration of their firm and various technic. Though he seems at first like his contemporaries in looking backward to what was going or gone, he knew better than they what to look for in the Roman tradition. He is never either archaist or sophist. Images of classical reminiscence are used with fresh realization of their source in the sounds and colors of sea and fields and clouds. They are not tags, nor merely allusions, nor decoration. So used, they have much the same freshness as of old, or as the poet’s own immediate observation.

is at once old and original; and the last line of this poem focuses the whole in a pregnant phrase:

Conceived by him habitually in cosmical aspects, nature none the less struck his senses in distinct detail. The philosopher was a poet.

Boethius thus revived the old poetic terseness, as in

not merely because he was too original and too serious to be deviated by the literary habit of dilation, but because he grasped constructively the economy set forth in the De sublimitate[5] as a poetic principle.

Having thus suggested the mood of oppression through images of the blind frustration of man by the heavens and the earth, the lyric contrasts the first, joyous contemplation of nature “under the open sky,” advances to the inevitable later pondering upon the causes of movements so stupendous, and returns to the unyielding inertia of environment, still sharply imaged, but now carried from mood to conviction. The essentially poetic composition of his lyrics saves them from what would otherwise seem too intellectual solutions. Stolidam cernere terram is, indeed, as some other closes of his, a logical conclusion; but it is not reached by a logical process, nor is it mere epigram. It is the final satisfying image of a composition intensely and progressively imaginative. The immense medieval vogue of the Consolatio must often have reminded apt spirits of the true method of poetry.

In detail also Boethius set a chastening example. The spiritual elevation of this very lyric may have suggested for hymns[7] a measure that otherwise would hardly have seemed available. Analysis reveals a fondness for cæsural effects of syncope, for rime, and for subtler recurrences. The next lines are:

But the italics exaggerate recurrences which to the ear are not exaggerated. Boethius does not remind us of literary devices. He never descends to word-play. His rime[8] is neither insistent nor inclined to the later art of stanzas. It is merged in the other suggestions of a various harmony.

The third measure of the third book, echoed now and then in hymns, slows its pace not only by the cæsural pause, but by the predominance of spondees at the onset.

Such reflective lyrics were so readily assimilated to medieval thought that their grave and restrained form must have been instructive in the centuries of poetic transition.

B. Prudentius, Sedulius, Fortunatus

Prudentius[9] devoted much capable and dignified verse in many meters and in several distinct literary forms entirely to the service of religion. The Psychomachia, in some nine hundred hexameters, is an allegory of the soul’s warfare. Such description as that which introduces Avarice[10] handed on from Roman antiquity to the middle age the poetic habit of presenting personified abstractions by appropriate costume, gesture, and speech. The habit is allegory in its most obvious form; the method is the descriptive ecphrasis[11] transferring to poetry the rhetorical doctrine of appropriateness. It is the method of Martianus Capella in the same age and of Alain de Lille in the thirteenth century.[12]

Reviewing his life in the preface to the Days (Cathemerinon), Prudentius seeks a poetry proper to his old age in hymns.

The twelve poems that follow, cast in nine different measures, are lyric reflections on the daily recurrences of cockcrow, food or fast, lamplighting, sleep; or on the festal recurrences of Christmas or Epiphany. They are poems of some length, not hymns in the specific sense to which the word was soon limited. But stanzas selected from them were combined to make the Breviary hymns for Lauds on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and for the feasts of the Holy Innocents, the Epiphany, and the Transfiguration. Almost equally familiar in the middle age was the Corde natus[13] hymn taken from the ninth poem.

The Crowns (Peristephanon) is a group of fourteen poems commemorating martyrs. Some are even longer than those of the preceding group; and the narrative of St. Romanus extends to eleven hundred iambic trimeters in five-line stanzas. Other lyric stanzas are pressed into the service of narrative, as well as the better adapted hexameter and elegiac. There is little narrative movement. What Prudentius sought was detailed description, the making of martyrdom vivid. This, rather than the vogue of declamatio,[14] explains a certain diffuseness and the violence of many physical horrors of torture and execution. His descriptive habit is utterly different from Claudian’s. That he was not thinking of rhetoric seems sufficiently evident from his ignoring the recipes of encomium.[15]

The remaining verses of Prudentius, nearly four thousand hexameters, more than one-third of his work, present theology by exposition and argument.[16]

The main work of Sedulius[17] is a hexameter paraphrase of the Bible; but he is better known for his Carmen paschale because this gave to the Breviary two hymns.[18] Its rimes suggest increasing inclination toward regularity, forecasting the time when what the ancient prosody felt as a device of style was to become a device of composition, a recognized method of emphasizing words and of making stanzas.

But rime was recognized slowly as a composing principle. Fortunatus[19] in the next century used it often enough, indeed, to show intention, but still incidentally. His famous hymn Vexilla regis, ignoring rime in its first quatrain, ends every line of the second with the same sound, and three of them with double rime.[20] Contemporary interest in meter appears in the poem replying to Gregory’s request for Sapphics.[21] Most of his many other graceful occasional poems are in elegiacs. One other hymn achieved a fame second only to that of the Vexilla regis, the Pange, lingua, gloriosi. These two great Passion hymns may be taken as typical of the transitional poetic of the time. They are at once old and new. Each is a veritable hymn, not adapted as were the selections from Prudentius, but composed in a popular measure for community singing. Turning back to them from their successors of the great medieval period, one almost inevitably renders them with the same strong stresses. So read, they seem not to lose, but to gain in emphasis and swing. Who shall prove that they were not so rendered in the poet’s own time? But who shall prove that they were? Against such rendering is clear evidence that Fortunatus controlled expertly the ancient quantitative prosody. For it are, first, the measures themselves, which come from popular verse accentual even in ancient Rome, and, second, a shift of speaking habit spreading slowly through the new Roman world. Both these must now be examined.

C. The Earlier Latin Hymns[22]

Here is new poetry, and the beginning of a new poetic. Not graver than Boethius in rejecting decoration, not terser in rejecting dilation, it is more direct, more simply responsive. The communal expression, the imaginative answer of people united, is as distinct poetically from individual reflection as is the communal hope from pensive resignation. The hope that Boethius had, but did not express in his Consolatio, appears here as above all a communal inspiration. The hymns are popular essentially in being the poetry of a society, the kingdom of heaven. Often intensely lyric, they express typically in these earlier centuries the emotions of a community. Their poets, many of them soon forgotten, if ever known, without thought of individual fame sought to give voice to what all felt together. The wide and continued vogue of the early hymns testifies to the validity of their popular poetic.

Their popularity is conspicuous in their verse. The measure above may be found, indeed, among learned poets; but it is originally and usually the verse of common people. Latin popular verse, even in classical times, was probably accentual. Though still called by the grammarians dimeter, this particular measure is certainly accentual as it is used in hymns of later centuries, and as it is rendered later even in hymns of this early period. Is it accentual as rendered even here at the beginning of Latin hymnody? The answer, though still disputed, has been much advanced in the last fifty years. To begin with clear terms, accentual means controlled by stresses; quantitative, controlled by time. All verse beyond mere mechanical exercise and doggerel has both elements; but every verse has one or the other for its control, its rhythm. All verse is something like dance, something like song; but every verse is dominated by the one rhythm or the other. In this sense English verse is accentual. Every expert English poet regards time also, as he is aware of alliteration or subtler recurrences, or as he uses rime; but he sets and holds his rhythm by stresses. In this sense modern French verse is quantitative. Though it regards other elements, including stress, it makes time, as English verse does not, essential in its pattern. The same difference distinguishes the verse of Bernard of Morlaix from the verse of Vergil, and generally medieval Latin verse from ancient. Medieval Latin verse has a different rhythm. Probably the new rhythmical habit began early.

But when we try to determine dates, we should remember that old verse habits give way to new gradually. Poetic does not progress by revolutions. The decorative habit of the Roman de la Rose, though it is now a curious piece of antiquity, survived long after Chaucer had outgrown it and had even exploded it in satire. In verse, too, the three centuries including Chaucer help us to understand the centuries from Sedulius to Bede. With other court poets, Chaucer was bilingual. He not only understood and spoke French; he had French verse in his subconscious mind. True, the French verse of his time shows, more than that of to-day, awareness of stress. The two rhythms were so much less distinct that Chaucer could more easily turn French to the profit of his own development in metric. None the less his rhythm is English. In spite of his ready tolerance of a shift of stress in foreign words, and of the enhancing of his harmonies by long vowels, his rhythm, the pattern or control of his verse, is consistently accentual. The first great English poet, as he used French, indeed, but turned for his poetry to English, kept no less confidently English rhythm.

In the fourth century Latin verse showed distinctly side by side two rhythms. Quantitative verse, long confirmed by Greek example and often directly imitative of Greek models, held the field of culture. The verse of Horace, Vergil, Ovid, it imposed itself upon all educated poets. Its influence controlled the schools through the archaistic teaching of style; and its quantitative prosody continued for centuries to be taught as part of grammatica. But all this while another rhythm was heard from the mouths of soldiers in songs of marching beat. What is somewhat indefinitely known as Saturnian verse moved beneath and behind literature, sometimes broke in half-conscious echoes through learned poetry, then gained the ground lost by literary standards, and finally won recognition as valid poetry in the hymns.[24]

Eventually the manuals of metric, which in any age proverbially lag behind current habit, distinguished the new verse by a new application of an old name. They called it rhythmus. The ancient quantitative verse is generally referred to in the middle age as metrum (metra, metricus, etc.); the new Latin verse, as rhythmus (rithmus, rithmicus, etc.). Bede’s De arte metrica, written early in the eighth century and widely used as a textbook, distinguishes as follows:

Bede is apparently feeling his way, and evidently trying to find warrant for a new poetic in ancient authority. Victorinus, whom he is quoting,[26] may intend by rhythmus and numerus nothing more than their older, more general sense. Bede’s variations and additions make specific and unmistakable application to the verse of the hymns as distinct from metra. The testimony, first to the new habit, and secondly to the recognition of it as a valid and beautiful poetic, is testimony to fact. In a schoolbook of the early eighth century Ambrosians are exhibited as rhythmi; and rhythmi are recognized as a distinct, self-sufficient method of verse.

Though the change of verse habit was slow, though metra were composed long after rhythmi had won the field, and though on the other hand even early hymns that are metrically correct may have been rendered as rhythmi, the progressive prevalence of accentual composition can hardly be doubted; for it answers a shift in the habit of speech itself. By the seventh century Latin was no longer spoken even by the learned, much less by the average monk in England or Spain, as it had been spoken by Cicero. The change of speech tune, doubtless more rapid among men not born to the language, certainly unequal and gradual, seems to be a fact in the history of the language.[27]

Some of the earliest verse generally recognized as rhythmus comes from Ireland.[28] The earliest known hymn manuscript is the so-called Antiphonary of [Irish] Bangor,[29] which is not an antiphonary, but a collection of hymns, prayers, and canticles. In poetic art these range all the way from measures of noble beauty, some of which appear to have been composed as metra, to mnemonic jingle. The following hymn is probably of the fifth or sixth century:

On its face this is a metrum, the familiar iambic dimeter. Rendered as a rhythmus, it would freely disregard quantities, stress the final syllable of each line, and elsewhere generally stress the word-accent: ígnis creâtor ígneús. Though either measure is satisfying, the safer assumption is that the composer intended a metrum.

Probably even older, on the other hand, is St. Sechnall’s (Secundinus, fifth century) fervent but rude praise of St. Patrick in twenty-three stanzas beginning with the successive letters of the alphabet.

Here the ignoring of quantities is such as to preclude a metrum.[30] But accentual interpretation also is difficult. Read as a rhythmus based on the Corde natus measure,[31] which was frequently thus used later, it moves tolerably in certain stanzas (e.g., 4 and 7), but in others, including the two quoted, intolerably violates word-accent. Read by word-accent as a rhythmus of three stresses, it makes extravagant use of two intervening unstressed syllables.[32] Indeed, without some clearer clue than has yet been offered, we can hardly be sure what measure was intended.[33] Much less should we regard it as representative of the early poetic capacity of rhythmus. That capacity is amply vindicated in other hymns of this very manuscript.

1. Iambic

Examination of the early hymns measure by measure begins with St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan at the end of the fourth century. Both his own fame and the recognition of a typical stanza appear in the general use of the adjective Ambrosian to describe many hymns of unknown authorship and sometimes of uncertain date. The canon of his own hymns has, indeed, been determined;[34] but it is less important than his achievement of a type. His answer to a common need established a common form. He had the discernment, first, to select a popular measure often used accentually, and then so to use it as to obey both the popular stress habit and the learned poetic of quantity. That his hymns are valid either as metra or as rhythmi means, though his regard for word-accent shows that he foresaw the latter rendering, that they must have been composed in the former, and probably that time rhythm was still heard in speech. The increase of the stress habit gradually worked a transformation. The regular dactylic close hardly satisfying so short a line, the final syllable, which even in the ancient metric might be long sometimes, came to be stressed always. As a metrum the iambic dimeter ran Ætērnĕ rērūm cōndĭtŏr; as a rhythmus it became Ætérne rérum cónditór. The effect, though different, is not inferior. For the distinctive verse values of rhythmi, heard at their best in later hymns freely so composed, can be discerned even here in the earliest centuries by rendering as rhythmi—as in fact they came to be rendered—two of the most familiar hymns taken from the dimeters of Prudentius.

The accentual habit spread slowly and intermittently as a change of control from one element of verse to another. Both elements continued in the better hymns to vary and enhance what must otherwise become monotonous or bald; but the control, the rhythm, gradually changed from time to stress. Variety through shifting the places of stress[35] appears in several hymns of the sixth century. The Ambrosian quoted by Bede as an example of rhythmus[36] even begins with a stress;[37] and the probable following of word-accent often gives a dactylic opening.

Similar variations appear in the “Versus Flavii ad Mandatum.”

Though possible lingering or revival of a sense of quantities, and the shifting pronunciation of proper names, leave uncertainties (as above, for example in Adam and vitæ), there is little doubt that such variations were not only accepted, but even sought. They often relieve dubious measures; and conversely they are sometimes used in ruder rhythmi so excessively as to blur the verse pattern. One of the Bangor hymns seems to run best as follows:

If so, the syncope in line 2 serves to emphasize vox. But the verse of this hymn is inferior.[38] The better hymns use the variations with better art.

2. Trochaic

More immediately suggestive of accentual rendering was another soldiers’ measure used by Prudentius in the first poem of his Crowns (Peristephanon), a commemoration of two soldier martyrs. It was better known through a hymn taken from the ninth poem of his Days.

Rendered as a rhythmus, as in the hymn quoted by Bede,[40] the measure, besides ending with a stress, was often divided at the cæsura, to make stanzas of six four-stress lines; for the original line is long to handle singly; it tends to break. None of the other hymns taken from this poem of Prudentius is so familiar and so stirring as this of Fortunatus:

Possibly Fortunatus composed this as a rhythmus; more probably he thought of the soldiers’ marching stresses as reinforcing his metra. The long Bangor hymn ascribed to St. Hilary of Poitiers, and probably very old,[42] is quoted with admiration by Bede[43] as a metrum.

It has the deeper significance of exhibiting an early form of medieval symbolism.

The very different trochaic measure of the sixth-century Irish “breastplate” hymn, with abrupt pauses and rime, seems clearly a rhythmus, and deserves attention least of all for its art.

3. Other Measures

Less popular, more literary measures, though some of them were used early in the hymnaries, seem to have been interpreted as rhythmi more slowly. This, indeed, is what one would expect; but the evidence is not decisive. The Sapphic stanza, the beautiful meter of the second poem of Boethius,[44] even iambic trimeter, were in time transformed. But in hymns they were comparatively infrequent; and for other uses they were revived with what seems clearly quantitative intention and achievement. Either rendering is beautiful for one of the few Sapphic poems that are essentially hymns, a hymn for Sunday Lauds.

The most striking verse in the Bangor manuscript is that of the familiar Communion hymn.

The spondaic opening and the marked cæsura may be reminiscent of the Quamvis fluente dives auri gurgite of Boethius;[46] and the composition is far superior to the Bangor habit in sense of time values. Not only Irish and popular, but probably much older than this manuscript,[47] the hymn may have been composed as a metrum. By either rendering it is unusually, and at the same time expertly, free. Though the spread of stress rhythm carried some verse that is rude and mechanical, as in this manuscript, it did not of itself forfeit time values, and it opened in the old language new effects of verse.

4. Poetic Conceptions

But the newness of the verse is at best less significant than the newness of the poetry. A jaded world has been refreshed by new imaginative expression. Bede’s exhibition of Christian poetry is not merely pious; nor is it either timid or complacent. He is convinced of a new Latin poetry. As Augustine redeemed rhetoric, so Ambrose transformed poetic, by new motives. The tender image of the Holy Innocents playing with their palms and crowns[48] is neither old nor new; it is the timeless language of individual lyric. But the habitual conceptions of Prudentius and Ambrose, of Hilary and Gregory, are not individual; they are communal. The lyric of the hymns exalts the common emotions of common observance. It is the poetry of aspirations shared not only with all Christians everywhere, but with immediate companions turning work into worship. It expresses the visions of a fellowship.

No exception is found in the early hymns commemorating martyrs. The triumph is not personal. The individual heroism passes into the common hope of released energy and of the triumph of the kingdom of God. As early churches were built over the tombs of martyrs, and later additions made the nave look both down to the original confessione and up to the high altar, so the martyr hymns express both a common gratitude and a common devotion. So a hundred images of light, suggestions of dawn, noon, stars, the ordinary lamp, the candle in church, lead not to individual emotion, but to the poetry of theology.

In every light is the light of the world. The night-light (vigil lucerna) leads up to the giver of light, the creative fire (Ignis creator igneus, Lumen donator luminis).[49] Poetry discerns a new earth because of a new heaven, and finds both one. The poets of the hymns do not, as the Stoics, look down on the material world; they look through it. They neither belittle physical reality nor bow to it; they go on from it. Life in the hymns is not an urgent present and a visioned future; it is all one. The frame of the Christian year opens in the hymns on eternity. Eternal life begins now, and is not survival, but progressive release of human energy by God. Thus the Incarnation is revealed by Prudentius not in versified theology, but in poetic truth. It becomes a cosmic vision.

Though this conception was widespread through the Prudentian hymn Corde natus,[50] and though Prudentius was quite as much philosopher as poet, literary influences are insufficient to account for the consistent continuity of the hymns as thought. Even Fortunatus, who certainly was no philosopher, was uplifted by common visions. The single line Hymnum dicat turba fratrum[51] might be taken as a formula for the poetic of the early hymns. Hilary discerned also the communal appeal of the symbolism of the Old Testament, as Ambrose had discerned a communal verse; but though the hymns owe much to individuals, the character of their lyric grows from unifying communal conceptions of life.