Dies

Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a famous thirteenth century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano. It is a medieval Latin poem, differing from classical Latin by its accentual (non-quantitative) stress and its rhymed lines. The meter is trochaic. more...

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The poem describes the day of judgment, the last trumpet summoning souls before the throne of God, where the saved will be delivered and the unsaved cast into eternal flames. The hymn was used as a sequence in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass until the 1970 revision of the Roman Missal.

Use in the Catholic liturgy

Those familiar with musical settings of the Requiem Mass—such as those by Mozart or Verdi—will be aware of the important place of the Dies Iræ in the liturgy. Nevertheless it fell foul of the preferences of the "Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy"—the Vatican body charged with implementing (and indeed drafting) the reforms to the Catholic Liturgy ordered by the Second Vatican Council. The architect of these reforms, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, explains the mind of the members of the Consilium:

They got rid of texts that smacked of a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages. Thus they removed such familiar and even beloved texts as the Libera me, Domine, the Dies Iræ, and others that overemphasized judgment, fear, and despair. These they replaced with texts urging Christian hope and arguably giving more effective expression to faith in the resurrection.

It remained as the sequence for the Requiem Mass in the Roman Missal of 1962 (the last edition before the Second Vatican Council) and so is still heard in churches where the Tridentine Latin liturgy is celebrated.

The "Dies Irae" is still suggested in the Liturgy of the Hours for the Office of the Dead and during last week before Advent as the opening hymn for the Office of Readings, Lauds and Vespers (divided into three parts).

The Poem

The Latin text is taken from the Requiem Mass in the 1962 Roman Missal. The English version below was translated by William Josiah Irons in 1849 and appears in the English Missal. Note that the below translation is not literal, but modified to fit the rhyme and meter.

The poem appears complete as it stands at this point. Some scholars question whether the remainder is an addition made in order to suit the great poem for liturgical use, for the last stanzas discard the consistent scheme of triple rhymes in favor of rhymed couplets, while the last two lines abandon rhyme for assonance and are, moreover, catalectic: (this information is questionable. Editors at this point have actually offered this piece at a genuine requiem - it is sung, it is true, it is appropriate... Dona eis requiem.)

Read more at Wikipedia.org

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