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 DC] TRANSITION TO MEDIEVAL POETRY 296 He had a classical education and a command of the ancient metres. Quite naturally his poems contain pagan allusions. For instance, he brings in all the paraphernalia of Venus and Cupid in his epithalamion on the marriage of Sigebert and Brunhild. But in other poems, written under the inspiration of his friendship with the deep-hearted German woman Rada- gunda, there enters a new Germanic feeling as well as a deeper Christian spirit. An example is his long elegy on the marriage and death of Gelesvintha, sister of Brunhild. The poem was written for Radagunda, who loved the young bride. It has much feeling ; deep grief is expressed, the grief of a mother for a daughter torn from her to foreign wedlock, the grief of a daughter forced to leave her home to go among strangers — then comes premonition, then the violent death, and then lamentation of nurse and sister and mother for the murdered girl. A deeper feeling has entered Latin elegiac verse than it had previously possessed in these decadent centuries. This is also shown by other elegies of Fortunatus upon the troubles of Radagunda, — De Excidio Thoringiae. In these writ- ings, classic reminiscence and commonplace have given way to a genuine expression of the poet^s own feelings and the feelings of those surrounding him. Likewise with his hymns. Although they are met- rical and observe quantity, they belong to the coming time, rather than the past. His famous Vexilla regis prodeunt is in iambic dimeters, but assonance and rhyme help to express the new spirit with which it glows. His equally famous Pange^ lingua^ glorioai proe- Hum certaminia is in the popular trochaic tetrameter.