Dies Iræ, the name generally given to the celebrated Latin hymn on the Last Judgment, from the first words of its first stanza:
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
This incomparable hymn consists of seventeen such stanzas, with an eighteenth of four lines, and is based on the prophetic passage, Zephaniah, i. 14–18. It is probably the work of the Franciscan, Thomas de Celano, who died about 1255. The sublimity and force of its thoughts are well matched with the impressive solemnity of the verse, its stanzas of three lines, each with the same double rhyme, making the inmost soul tremble, 'as with three blows of a hammer,' says Guericke. It is said to have first appeared in the missals made at Venice about 1250, and is one of the five 'Sequences' that have been universally used in the Roman Catholic Church since the Council of Trent. Its place is in the Missa in commemoratione omnium fidelium defunctorum. The Tridentine text, published in 1567, is somewhat different from that in the old missals, and another and considerably inferior version appears on a marble tablet of unknown date, in a Franciscan church at Mantua. The Dies Iræ has been the subject of musical compositions by Palestrina, Haydn, Cherubini, and Mozart, and no religious poem has been more frequently translated. There are English translations by Crashaw, Macaulay, Lord Lindsay, Isaac Williams, and others. The opening stanzas are paraphrased in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto vi.
See Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (1892); 'Fifty Versions of the Dies Iræ' in the Dublin Review (1882); a list of ninety-two versions in the Athenæum (July 1890); and C. F. S. Warren, The Dies Iræ (1897).