Venantius Fortunatus

Venantius Fortunatus Poems

Venantius Fortunatus Biography

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus (c.530–c.600/609) was a Latin poet and hymnodist, and a Bishop of the early Catholic Church. He was canonised and is also known as Saint Venantius Fortunatus. He is best known for two poems that have become part of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the Pange Lingua Gloriosi Proelium Certaminis ("Sing, O tongue, of the glorious struggle"), a hymn that later inspired St Thomas Aquinas's Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium. He also wrote Vexilla Regis prodeunt ("The royal banners forward go"), which is a sequence sung at Vespers during Holy Week. This poem was written in honour of a large piece of the True Cross, which explains its association also with the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The relic had been sent from the Byzantine Emperor Justin II to Queen Radegund of the Franks, who after her husband Chlotar I's death had founded a monastery in Aquitaine. The Municipal Library in Poitiers houses an eleventh century manuscript on the life of Radegunde, copied from a sixth century account by Fortunatus. Venantius Fortunatus wrote Vita S. Martini as well as eleven surviving books of poetry in Latin in a diverse group of genres including epitaphs, panegyrics, georgics, consolations, and religious poems. His verse is important in the development of later Latin literature, largely because he wrote at a time when Latin prosody was moving away from the quantitative verse of classical Latin towards the accentual meters of medieval Latin. His style sometimes suggests the influence of Hiberno-Latin, in learned Greek coinages that occasionally appear in his poems. He also wrote a verse hagiography of St Martin of Tours and a hagiography of his patron Queen Radegund (continued by the nun Baudovinia).)

The Best Poem Of Venantius Fortunatus

A Winter Journey

Everywhere the tightening ice, the brittle hoarfrost;
the supple grassblades are beaten down.
The earth lies dead under an ice-hard shell,
the trees carry thick soft snow on their high leaves.
Running streams are diked by ice-crusts,
the thickening river wears a heavy skin,
its weight slowing the waters, the currents frozen,
as if punished for leaving their right road.
In the middle of the river a crystal iceberg floats.
We do not want to go under, or over!
The rough swollen river roars like the North wind:
who can find passage through this battling water?
But now, if the warm wind were to rise.
which at Creation was sent over the waters,
and if you called on the Almighty with fervent prayers,
then you would grant me, as I know you wish,
good fortune -- and for you I will prepare my soul,
and obey in all things. Dear God, I would do anything to please you!

Venantius Fortunatus Comments