Before giving examples of Adam's poems, a tribute should be paid to his great forerunner in the art of Latin verse. Adam doubtless was familiar with the hymns[1] of the most brilliant intellectual luminary of the departing generation, one Peter Abaelard, whom he may have seen in the flesh. Those once famous love-songs, written for Heloïse, perished (so far as we know) with the love they sang. Another fate—and perhaps Abaelard wished it so—was in store for the many hymns which he wrote for his sisters in Christ, the abbess and her nuns. They still exist,[2] and display a richness of verse-forms scarcely equalled even by the Sequences of Adam. In the development of Latin verse, Abaelard is Adam's immediate predecessor; his verses being, as it were, just one stage inferior to Adam's in sonorousness of line, in certainty of rhythm, and in purity of rhyme.
The "prose" Sequences were not the direct antecedents of Abaelard's hymns. Yet both sprang from the freely devising spirit of melody and song; and therefore those hymns are of this free-born lineage more truly than they are descendants of antique forms. To be sure, every possible accentual rhythm, built as it must be of trochees, iambics, anapaests, or dactyls, has unavoidably some antique quantitative antecedent; because the antique measures exhausted the possibilities of syllabic combination. Yet antecedence is not source, and most of Abaelard's verses by their form and spirit proclaim their genesis in the creative exigencies of song as loudly as they disavow any antique parentage.
For example, there may be some far echo of metrical asclepiads in the following accentual and rhyme-harnessed twelve-syllable verse:
"Advenit veritas, umbra praeteriit,
- ↑ While Sequences may be called hymns, all hymns are not Sequences. For the hymn is the general term designating a verbal composition sung in praise of God or His saints. A Sequence then would be a hymn having a peculiar history and a certain place in the Liturgy.
- ↑ Contained in Migne 178, col. 1771 sqq. They have not been properly edited or even fully published.
