“Zion, to thy Saviour singing,
To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing
Sweetest hymns of love and praise,
Thou wilt never reach the measure
Of thy most ecstatic lays.”
IV. MEDIEVAL DEVOTIONAL POEMS
We now reach the consideration of hymns and poems of great excellence in themselves but without the appeal, or practicability as hymns, possessed by the foregoing. Some of them appear in liturgical hymnals, or in more formal hymnals of non-liturgical churches, but their use is limited.
Among these is Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun,”[4] not a hymn, but a psalm of praise for all created things. For our day it has chiefly literary and antiquarian interest.
His follower and biographer, Thomas of Celano (?-1255), however, wrote a sequence or hymn that has intrigued the interest of generation after generation. Mozart’s “Requiem” uses parts of it as its text. Goethe introduces it in his “Faust.” Unnumbered translations of it have been made into all civilized languages. Theodore Parker called it the “damnation lyric.” In the original “Dies irae” there were eighteen stanzas. The version of W. J. Irons has fourteen stanzas of three lines each, a few of which follow:
“Day of Wrath! O day of mourning!