“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.” These opening words from the well-loved English hymn have been sung at many funerals ever since its composition in the mid-nineteenth century, including those of Queen Mary of Teck and Mother Teresa. The stirring melodic line and its accompanying harmonic texture help to ground our faith in the midst of the darkness and death which is the subject of the text.¹ It seems appropriate that such a hymn be used at funerals – to comfort the mourners and help them to trust in God. We desire that Lord abide with us in the midst of our sorrows.
By comparison, such consolation does not seem to be the goal of the composer of the great liturgical sequence known as the Dies Irae. “That day of wrath, that dreadful day, / When heaven and earth shall pass away, / Both David and the Sibyl say.”² This thirteenth-century composition, perhaps the work of Thomas of Celano,³ presents us with an alarming picture of the judgment day of the Lord spoken of by the prophet Zephaniah: “The great day of the Lord is near … A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom” (Zeph. 1:14a, 15). In contrast to the consoling major melody of Lyte’s Abide With Me, the medieval Gregorian chant of the Dies Irae presents listeners with an eerie feeling even in its first four opening notes (in solfege syllables, fa-mi-fa-re). By immediately highlighting the unsettling interval of a half-step (fa-mi-fa), the composer sets a rather somber tone for the entirety of his composition. Not without reason has such a motif has been borrowed by countless composers throughout the centuries to create a sense of sadness, distress, or terror.⁴
But the genius of this well-known sequence certainly does not stop with the opening phrase. Musically, the Dies Irae is a long melody consisting of three basic melodic phrases corresponding to each verse (with immediate repetitions of each musical phrase so that the piece could be sung in a call and response fashion). The long melody of the piece is repeated three times, except for the last repetition, in which the melody is broken by a completely new phrase at the words “Lacrimosa dies illa…”
It is wonderful to see how well the text works with the accompanying music. Take, for instance, the phrase “Tuba mirum spargens sonum,” translated as “The mighty trumpet’s marvelous tone / Shall pierce through each sepulchral stone / And summon all before the throne.” This phrase is, musically, the highest in the piece, and it jumps out at us much like the clarion call of the judgment day trumpet. The antepenultimate phrase Lacrimosa also provides a striking musical motif: it is the only unique melodic phrase (i.e., without any repetition): its jump of a fifth followed by another half-step (la-te) feels very much like the tearful day which the text aptly describes.
Speaking of the text, the beautifully composed verses of the Dies Irae, like their rather grave accompanying melody, also seem far from consoling. The whole work is, in brief, a description of the last day (verses 1-6) followed by an expression of “the anguish of one of the multitude there present in spirit—his pleading before the Judge…who, on Judgment Day, will be a Judge of infinite justice, before whom scarcely the just will be secure.”⁵
So why has the Church, at least in times past,⁶ appointed this doomsday sequence to be sung on the feast of All Souls and at the funeral Masses of her children? It should be noted, first, that the sequence was originally a work of private devotion and, when it came into the liturgy, was perhaps intended for the beginning of Advent, when the liturgical year turns our attention toward the second coming of Christ and His Judgment.⁷ This would explain why most of the poem is written in the first person; like so much of the liturgy we are called to place ourselves in the midst of the liturgical text. In her wisdom, however, the Church over the centuries applied this sequence also to the faithful departed. Why?
On the commemoration of all the faithful departed, November 2, and throughout the month of November, we are called to pray especially for our beloved dead. In this case, then, when we pray the Dies Irae, the first person perspective becomes the perspective of the holy souls; we sing these lines in their place, begging God to have mercy on them and free them quickly from the fires of purgatory. Verse twelve takes on special significance considered under this aspect as a prayer for the holy souls: “I groan beneath the guilt, which Thou / Canst read upon my blushing brow; / But spare, O God, Thy suppliant now.” Canonized saints aside, we do not know the fate of any deceased, and we pray that each has been given the grace to pass their particular judgment (as well as the final judgment!) and enter the kingdom of heaven.
Additionally, the prayers for the deceased which we pray especially in this month of November also remind us to pray for all the dying and for our own family and friends, even for ourselves – for all those who, whether they know it or not, may well be on the cusp of their own particular judgment. “You know not the day nor the hour,” says our Lord.⁸ The sentiments of the Dies Irae are perhaps best suited to these souls; we beg that the Lord, on the “tearful day” of our death, would “be thou the trembling sinner’s stay” (verse 18). And we have every confidence that if we turn to Him in repentance, He will indeed grant us mercy: “Good Lord, ‘twas for my sinful sake / That Thou our suffering flesh didst take / Then do not now my soul forsake” (verse 9). The Lord came to save us, not to condemn us; but we must let Him save us!
So if we have never prayed the Dies Irae, we should not let this November go by without picking up its text or singing its ancient melody. For in fact, in the midst of the terror depicted in its lines, we find also a great reliance upon the mercy of God, expressed in Latin even more poetically than Lyte’s beautiful hymn: Qui Mariam absolvisti, / Et latronem exaudisti, / Mihi quoque spem dedisti. “Thou who didst Mary’s sins unbind, / And mercy for the robber find, / Dost fill with hope my anxious mind.” Pie Jesu, Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen. “O holy Jesus, Lord, grant to them eternal rest. Amen.”
1) The text of Abide With Me was written by Henry Francis Lyte (d. 1847). Its beautiful melody, EVENTIDE, was composed by William H. Monk (d. 1889).
2) The Latin poetry of this work is exquisite, and over 200 English translations have been made. The one used throughout this article come from Rev. Matthew Britt’s The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal. (New York: Benzinger Bros., 1924), 202-204.
3) Thomas of Celano (d. 1260) was the friend and biographer of St. Francis of Assisi. Other possible authors include St. Gregory the Great, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, etc. See Hugh Henry’s article “Dies Irae” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908). http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04787a.htm
4) The use of the melody of the Dies Irae reminds the listener of the doomsday text which it underlies, but the point here is that even the nature of the music itself is unsettling. For an impressive list of such musical quotations, see Alex Ludwig, “Dies Irae” at https://alexludwig.net/dies-irae/
5) Rev. Matthew Britt. The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal, 207.
6) The current Roman Missal does not call for the singing of the Dies Irae, neither on All Souls Day nor for funerals.
7) David Bernard Shea, “The Dies Irae: A Historical, Textual, Topical and Metrical Analysis,” (Carrol College, 1965), 39-40.
8) Cf. Mt 24:36.
