Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/274

256 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. lyric, the hymn of praise to Christ the bridegroom, which is sung by one of the virgins, while the others respond in chorus with recurring refrain. The metre is iambic, but with so many violations of quantity as to indicate that the poet — a learned man — realized the existence of accent as a principle of verse. In form the hymn appears related to the classic Par- thenia, as of Pindar and Alcman, some fragments of which remain. But instead of Greek maidens singing a glad farewell to maidenhood, here Christian virgins utter the souPs ecstasy on its mystic espousals unto everlasting virginity. " I am pure for thee, and bear- ing lighted torches, bridegroom, I go to meet thee " — this is the choral refrain ; and the verses hymn the joy of the virgin soul as it hears the call of the heavenly bridegroom and hastens to meet him clothed in white, gladly fleeing the marriage bed and the mournful joys of mortals, yearning for the shelter of the bridegroom's life-giving arms and for the sight of his beauty. The closing strophes draw the Old Testa- ment types of virgin chastity into this song of praise. A comparison of these poems with the correct met- rical compositions of Gregory Nazianzen and Synesius goes far to show that the simple and sincere tone of the earlier compositions is not unrelated to their violation of metre and recognition of the force of accent. The poems of Synesius and Gregory, on the other hand, illustrate the final failure of metrical Christian poetry in Greek. Synesius, the younger of the two, never dropped his Neo-platonism.^ He com- posed a number of hymns metrically correct ; but his 1 Ante, p. 78.