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Foebus abierat ("Phoebus had gone") 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.
Contents
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.
The text
The poem was rediscovered in 1960 by the medieval-lyric specialist Peter Dronke 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."
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:
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.
The form
The poem, in monorhyme, is structured in five strophes 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.
Musical versions
The early music ensemble Sequentia performs and has recorded a setting of Foebus abierat as part of its "Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper" program.