Planctus de Obitu Karoli

Planctus De Obitu Karoli

The Planctus (de obitu) Karoli ("Lament of Charlemagne"), also known by its incipit A solis ortu (usque ad occidua) ("From the rising of the sun "), is an anonymous medieval Latin planctus eulogising Charlemagne, written in accented verse by a monk of Bobbio shortly after his subject's death in 814. It is generally considered the earliest surviving planctus, thought its melody is written in tenth-century neumes, one of the earliest surviving examples of this sort of musical notation. The poem has been translated into English by Peter Godman.

The authorship of the Planctus has been a matter of some dispute. Its author has been identified with Columbanus of Saint Trond, who, it is claimed, also wrote the Ad Fidolium, a set of quantitative adonics. The Planctus appeared in a seventeenth-century manuscript compilation of the poems of Hrabanus Maurus under the subscription "Hymnus Columbani ad Andream episcopum de obitu Caroli", which inspired L. A. Muratori to make the identification, but this late ascription to a Columbanus is probably deduced from the poem's own seventeenth stanza. As argued by Heinz Löwe, that stanza in fact makes it very difficult to argue that the poet, who consistently uses the first person, was the Columbanus he refers to.

The poem is composed of twenty three-line romance strophes each with a distich of two dodecasyllables and the parenthetical heptasyllabic refrain Heu mihi misero!, which does not mark a division in thought but is inserted regularly in an otherwise continuous syntax. Each dodecasyllable ends in a paroxytone (mot métrique). The existence of quilisma in the musical notation indicates the influence of plainchant.

The first line (A solis ortu...) is drawn from a fifth-century hymn of Caelius Sedulius. As the Sedulian hymn was sung at Christmastime, the sorrowful Planctus presents a contrast with the joy typically associated with its opening. The poet expands upon his personal grief at the death of his emperor—and benefactor of Bobbio—by asking all the regions of Earth to mourn with him, and using the tears of Saint Columbanus, founder of Bobbio, as a symbol of the monastery's grief. The rhythm of the verse, presence of musical notation, and orientation towards contemporary events suggest popular recitation or performance. The poem, though associated with the Carolingian Renaissance in Latin letters, is not a commentary on the "disintegration" (or décomposition) of the Carolingian Empire after the death of Charlemagne.