Pervigilium Veneris

Pervigilium Veneris (or The Vigil of Venus) is a Latin poem of uncertain date, variously assigned to the 2nd, 4th or 5th centuries.

It is sometimes thought to have been by the poet , because of strong similarities with his poem Amnis ibat, though other scholars attribute it to Publius Annius Florus, and yet others find no sufficient evidence for any attribution. It was written professedly in early spring on the eve of a three-night festival of Venus (probably April 1–3) in a setting that seems to be Sicily. The poem describes the annual awakening of the vegetable and animal world through the "benign post-Lucretian" goddess, which contrasts with the tragic isolation of the silent "I" of the poet/speaker against the desolate background of a ruined city, a vision that prompts Andrea Cucchiarelli to note the resemblance of the poem's construction to the cruelty of a dream. It is notable because of its focus on the natural world (something never before seen in Roman poetry) which marks the transition from Roman poetry to medieval poetry. It consists of ninety-three verses in trochaic septenarius, and is divided into strophes of unequal length by the refrain:

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet.
Let him love tomorrow who has never loved, and let him who has loved love tomorrow.

The poem ends with the nightingale's song, and a poignant expression of personal sorrow:

illa cantat; nos tacemus; quando ver venit meum?
She sings; we are silent; when will my springtime come?

There are translations into English verse by the 17th-century poet Thomas Stanley (1651); by the 18th-century "graveyard school" poet Thomas Parnell (1679-1718); by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q"; by F. L. Lucas (1939; reprinted in his Aphrodite, Cambridge, 1948); and by Allen Tate (1947; see his Collected Poems).

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