Thomas of Celano, an Italian friar of…

Thomas of Celano, an Italian friar of the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor) and the probable author of the poem for the famous plainsong sequence “Dies irae” (“Day of Wrath”), dies in about 1260.

His celebrated composition, often judged to be the best medieval Latin poem, differs from classical Latin by its accentual (non-quantitative) stress and its rhymed lines; the meter is trochaic.

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 will be used as a sequence in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass until the 1970 revision of the Roman Missal.