Foebus abierat
Encyclopedia
Foebus abierat is a medieval Latin
poem, authorship unknown
, composed near the end of the 10th century in Northern Italy
. Described as "hauntingly beautiful" and "one of the joys of medieval poetry," it is an erotic dream-vision
lyric
spoken by a woman who grieves the departure of her lover Phoebus, brother of the Moon. Although the language is ecclesiastical Latin
, none of its content is explicitly Christian
.
An English
translation
of Foebus abierat by the Irish poet
Eavan Boland
was published in the April 2008 issue of Poetry magazine
. Boland describes the poem as the "long-ago cry of a woman finding and losing a body and soul":
Jane Stevenson
speculated in her book Women Latin Poets that this "highly original poem" was written by a nun
.
in a Bodleian
manuscript
dating ca. 1000 and copied at the monastery of Fleury
on the Loire river. Dronke published the history of the text, critical apparatus
, and commentary
in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford 1968, 2nd ed.), vol. 2, pp. 332–341. He has remarked that "the excitement of those moments of first finding and reading it, and realizing what it was, remains vivid in the memory even after sixteen years."
If the poem dramatizes a particular story, its source is unknown. In classical mythology
, Phoebus can be another name for Apollo
, god of music, healing, prophecy, and other forms of enlightenment who eventually shared Helios
's role as embodiment of the Sun.
, is structured in five strophe
s of five lines each in a meter
adapted from the classical asclepiad
. In form, Foebus abierat also resembles 8th–9th century Latin poems in simple rhymed strophes and draws on the vernacular ballad
tradition.
to medieval Latin in the poem, "The old language is present, but a skin of liturgy
and sorcery has been laid over it."
in both language and situation, most strongly the Heroides
— particularly Epistula 13 in which Laodamia
addresses her bridegroom Protesilaos, who has just sailed for Troy
; and Epistula 10, in which Ariadne
awakes to find herself abandoned by Theseus
— and the Ceyx
and Alcyone
episode of Metamorphoses 11.
or Church
doctrine
, it has nevertheless been read, as is often the case with erotic poetry of the Middle Ages
, in light of the Song of Songs
as an allegory
of the Bride
. Dronke, who believes the author of Foebus abierat was a man, suggests that the dreamlike erotic moment that ends with the lover disappearing and his bride in desolation has its origin in the Song of Songs, as does the enigma of whether the lover was even real.
A feminist interpretation
of the poem suggests that if the poet is a woman, she might have chosen secular language, particularly verbal echoes of classical antiquity, to express sexual desire in a manner that was deliberately freed of the Church's dogmatic constraints. M.B. Pranger reads the poem as "unambiguously profane in its meaning."
, which then disappears with the cock
's crow, that is, at dawn
— a motif also of the alba
.
ensemble Sequentia
performs and has recorded a setting of Foebus abierat as part of its "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper" program.
Medieval Latin
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...
poem, authorship unknown
Anonymous work
Anonymous works are works, such as art or literature, that have an anonymous, undisclosed, or unknown creator or author. In the United States it is legally defined as "a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author."...
, composed near the end of the 10th century in Northern Italy
Northern Italy
Northern Italy is a wide cultural, historical and geographical definition, without any administrative usage, used to indicate the northern part of the Italian state, also referred as Settentrione or Alta Italia...
. Described as "hauntingly beautiful" and "one of the joys of medieval poetry," it is an erotic dream-vision
Dream vision
A dream vision is a literary device in which a dream is recounted for a specific purpose. While dreams occur frequently throughout the history of literature, the dream vision emerged as a poetic genre in its own right, and was particularly popular in the Middle Ages. This genre typically follows a...
lyric
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
spoken by a woman who grieves the departure of her lover Phoebus, brother of the Moon. Although the language is ecclesiastical Latin
Ecclesiastical Latin
Ecclesiastical Latin is the Latin used by the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church in all periods for ecclesiastical purposes...
, none of its content is explicitly Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
.
An English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
of Foebus abierat by the Irish poet
Irish poetry
The history of Irish poetry includes the poetries of two languages, one in Irish and the other in English. The complex interplay between these two traditions, and between both of them and other poetries in English, has produced a body of work that is both rich in variety and difficult to...
Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland
-Biography:Boland's father, Frederick Boland, was a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted post-expressionist painter. She was born in Dublin in 1944. At the age of six, Boland's father was appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom; the family followed him to London,...
was published in the April 2008 issue of Poetry magazine
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
. Boland describes the poem as the "long-ago cry of a woman finding and losing a body and soul":
Jane Stevenson
Jane Stevenson
Professor Jane Stevenson is a UK author who was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing and Bonn. She has lectured in history at Sheffield University, and teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen, where she is currently is the Regius Professor of Humanity...
speculated in her book Women Latin Poets that this "highly original poem" was written by a nun
Nun
A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...
.
The text
The poem was rediscovered in 1960 by the medieval-lyric specialist Peter DronkePeter Dronke
Ernest Peter Michael Dronke FBA is a scholar specialising in Medieval Latin literature. He is one of the 20th century's leading scholars of medieval Latin lyric, and his book The Medieval Lyric is considered the standard introduction to the subject.-Life and career:Dronke was born in Cologne in...
in a Bodleian
Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library , the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library...
manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
dating ca. 1000 and copied at the monastery of Fleury
Fleury Abbey
Fleury Abbey in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, France, founded about 640, is one of the most celebrated Benedictine monasteries of Western Europe, which posseses the relics of St. Benedict of Nursia. Its site on the banks of the Loire has always made it easily accessible from Orléans, a center of...
on the Loire river. Dronke published the history of the text, critical apparatus
Critical apparatus
The critical apparatus is the critical and primary source material that accompanies an edition of a text. A critical apparatus is often a by-product of textual criticism....
, and commentary
Commentary (philology)
In philology, a commentary is a line-by-line or even word-by-word explication usually attached to an edition of a text in the same or an accompanying volume. It may draw on methodologies of close reading and literary criticism, but its primary purpose is to elucidate the language of the text and...
in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford 1968, 2nd ed.), vol. 2, pp. 332–341. He has remarked that "the excitement of those moments of first finding and reading it, and realizing what it was, remains vivid in the memory even after sixteen years."
The poem
The unnamed female speaker recalls a night in April when her lover, Phoebus, visited her and then departs mysteriously. In a prose approximation:Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
, Phoebus can be another name for Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
, god of music, healing, prophecy, and other forms of enlightenment who eventually shared Helios
Helios
Helios was the personification of the Sun in Greek mythology. Homer often calls him simply Titan or Hyperion, while Hesiod and the Homeric Hymn separate him as a son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia or Euryphaessa and brother of the goddesses Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn...
's role as embodiment of the Sun.
The form
The poem, in monorhymeMonorhyme
Monorhyme is a rhyme scheme in which each line has an identical rhyme. This is common in Arabic, Latin, and Welsh works, such as The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, e.g. Qasida and its derivative Kafi. Monorhyme is also used in the third verse of American rapper Jay-Z's song Already Home....
, is structured in five strophe
Strophe
A strophe forms the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music," as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe...
s of five lines each in a meter
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
adapted from the classical asclepiad
Asclepiad (poetry)
An Asclepiad is a line of poetry following a particular metrical pattern. The form is attributed to Asclepiades of Samos and is one of the Aeolic metres....
. In form, Foebus abierat also resembles 8th–9th century Latin poems in simple rhymed strophes and draws on the vernacular ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
tradition.
Sources and influences
As Boland remarks on the relation of classicalClassical Latin
Classical Latin in simplest terms is the socio-linguistic register of the Latin language regarded by the enfranchised and empowered populations of the late Roman republic and the Roman empire as good Latin. Most writers during this time made use of it...
to medieval Latin in the poem, "The old language is present, but a skin of liturgy
Liturgy
Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those...
and sorcery has been laid over it."
Classical elements
Foebus abierat echoes the poetry of OvidOvid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
in both language and situation, most strongly the Heroides
Heroides
The Heroides , or Epistulae Heroidum , are a collection of fifteen epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets, and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek and Roman mythology, in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated,...
— particularly Epistula 13 in which Laodamia
Laodamia
In Greek mythology, the name Laodamia referred to:* Laodamia or Deidamia, daughter of Bellerophon and Philonoe, sister of Hippolochus and Isander and the mother of Sarpedon by Zeus. She was shot by Artemis one day when she was weaving...
addresses her bridegroom Protesilaos, who has just sailed for Troy
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
; and Epistula 10, in which Ariadne
Ariadne
Ariadne , in Greek mythology, was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios, the Sun-titan. She aided Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur and was the bride of the god Dionysus.-Minos and Theseus:...
awakes to find herself abandoned by Theseus
Theseus
For other uses, see Theseus Theseus was the mythical founder-king of Athens, son of Aethra, and fathered by Aegeus and Poseidon, both of whom Aethra had slept with in one night. Theseus was a founder-hero, like Perseus, Cadmus, or Heracles, all of whom battled and overcame foes that were...
— and the Ceyx
Ceyx
Ceyx may be:*In Greek mythology:**Ceyx, son of Eosphorus, husband to Alcyone. After whom is named:***Ceyx , son of Lucifer and the goddess Diana***Ceyx , a genus of kingfisher...
and Alcyone
Alcyone
In Greek mythology, Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, either by Enarete or Aegiale. She married Ceyx, son of Eosphorus, the Morning Star....
episode of Metamorphoses 11.
Christian allegory
Although the poem makes no specific references to ChristChrist
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
or Church
Christian Church
The Christian Church is the assembly or association of followers of Jesus Christ. The Greek term ἐκκλησία that in its appearances in the New Testament is usually translated as "church" basically means "assembly"...
doctrine
Doctrine
Doctrine is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system...
, it has nevertheless been read, as is often the case with erotic poetry of the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, in light of the Song of Songs
Song of songs
Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, is a book of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. It may also refer to:In music:* Song of songs , the debut album by David and the Giants* A generic term for medleysPlays...
as an allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
of the Bride
Bride of Christ
The Bride of Christ or bride, the Lamb's wife is a term used in the New Testament of The Bible. Sometimes the Bride is implied through calling Jesus a Bridegroom. Sometimes the Church is compared to a bride betrothed to Christ. However there are instances where the interpretation of the usage of...
. Dronke, who believes the author of Foebus abierat was a man, suggests that the dreamlike erotic moment that ends with the lover disappearing and his bride in desolation has its origin in the Song of Songs, as does the enigma of whether the lover was even real.
A feminist interpretation
Feminist literary criticism
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...
of the poem suggests that if the poet is a woman, she might have chosen secular language, particularly verbal echoes of classical antiquity, to express sexual desire in a manner that was deliberately freed of the Church's dogmatic constraints. M.B. Pranger reads the poem as "unambiguously profane in its meaning."
The ballad tradition
A theme of medieval ballads is the visitation of a woman by her lover's ghostGhost
In traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. Descriptions of the apparition of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to...
, which then disappears with the cock
Rooster
A rooster, also known as a cockerel, cock or chanticleer, is a male chicken with the female being called a hen. Immature male chickens of less than a year's age are called cockerels...
's crow, that is, at dawn
Dawn
Dawn is the time that marks the beginning of the twilight before sunrise. It is recognized by the presence of weak sunlight, while the sun itself is still below the horizon...
— a motif also of the alba
Alba (poetry)
The alba is a subgenre of Occitan lyric poetry. It describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, must separate for fear of being discovered by their respective spouses....
.
Musical versions
The early musicEarly music
Early music is generally understood as comprising all music from the earliest times up to the Renaissance. However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises,...
ensemble Sequentia
Sequentia (music group)
Sequentia is an early music ensemble, founded in 1977 by Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton . The group specializes mainly in Medieval music. Sequentia focuses particularly on music with texts, specifically chants and other stories with music, such as the Icelandic Edda...
performs and has recorded a setting of Foebus abierat as part of its "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper" program.
Selected bibliography
- Boland, EavanEavan Boland-Biography:Boland's father, Frederick Boland, was a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted post-expressionist painter. She was born in Dublin in 1944. At the age of six, Boland's father was appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom; the family followed him to London,...
. Translator's note to "Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over." PoetryPoetry (magazine)Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
, April 2008, p. 37 online; text of translation. - Dronke, PeterPeter DronkeErnest Peter Michael Dronke FBA is a scholar specialising in Medieval Latin literature. He is one of the 20th century's leading scholars of medieval Latin lyric, and his book The Medieval Lyric is considered the standard introduction to the subject.-Life and career:Dronke was born in Cologne in...
. "Learned Lyric and Popular Ballad in the Early Middle Ages." In The Medieval Poet and His World. Storia e letteratura raccolta di studi e test 164. Rome 1984, pp. 167ff. with Latin text online. - Dronke, Peter. Sources of Inspiration: Studies in Literary Transformations, 400–1500. Storia e letterature raccolta di studi e testi 196. Rome 1997. Limited preview online.
- Stevenson, JaneJane StevensonProfessor Jane Stevenson is a UK author who was born in London and brought up in London, Beijing and Bonn. She has lectured in history at Sheffield University, and teaches literature and history at the University of Aberdeen, where she is currently is the Regius Professor of Humanity...
. Women Latin Poets. Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 116 online.