Completorium

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
Completorium
Poem Information
Other names	Evening, Æfensang, ǽfenleoð
Written	June 1910
Revised	22 April 1915, 2 May 1915
Published	The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Compline

Completorium is a poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in June of 1910 following the writing of Morning.

Poem excerpt

The dusty afternoon is past
By all the gathered unshed tears
Of all the day, as Even nears,
Grown mellow, till it fade at last.
The vapour that despondent lowers
In cloudy bars o'er purer skies
Does now in Evening's memory rise
To burning heights and golden towers.

Background

In June of 1910, sometime after writing the poem Morning, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the poem Evening. In a list of poems marked "Attempts at Verse", Tolkien included the poem Evening and named it Æfensang in Old English between Morning Song and The Dale-lands. Tolkien subsequently included Evening in a another list of poems in which he named it ǽfenleoð in Old English.

Sometime in April of 1915, Tolkien revised the poem to be "slightly longer", inscribing the date on it and "To EMB". On 22 April, Tolkien again rewrote the poem, inscribing "March 1910 rewritten April 22 1915" on it, developing it into a fourth version which he inscribed "March 1910 | Rewritten Ap[ril] 22 1915". Tolkien later changed the name to Completorium on this draft. On 2 May, Tolkien made a fifth version of the poem, inscribing the date and "1915" on it. Sometime later in the same month, a professional typescript of the poem "may have been made". Either "at the end of 1915 or the start of 1916, Tolkien included Completorium on a list of poems that may have been related to The Trumpets of Faërie.

In 2006, the poem was first mentioned by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull in The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, where they mistakenly wrote on page 63 that Tolkien first composed Completorium in March of 1910. In September of 2024, the poem was published for the first time as entry 3 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. In their commentary, Hammond and Scull corrected their earlier error in dating the poem, explaining that Tolkien's "June 1910" inscription is contemporary with the earliest manuscript while Tolkien's "March 1910" inscriptions were on later drafts subsequent to writing them. In their Addenda and Corrigenda to The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull suggested that if they "are correct that list D in Appendix III may be dated initially to 1915, then the appearance in that list of Completorium, thus, must indicate that that title existed by 1915, and therefore was contemporary at least with the final manuscript" in May of 1915. They also corrected a typo in which they wrote "typescript" instead of "professional typescript".

Inspiration

In a review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Journal of Tolkien Research, John R. Holmes notes that the poem Evening is a reflection "of nature…or the astronomy of daybreak". In their commentary to the poem in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull noted that Tolkien's name for the poem, Completorium, is "the Latin name for the last service of the day in Catholic ritual" which is "more often known as Compline".

In a blog post on 5 October, Tolkiensecretfire notes that "it would be surprising if Tolkien, being the ward of Father Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory from about 1904 to 1911, did not attend Completorium at the Oratory at least dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times during that period". Tolkiensecretfire suggests that the phrase "no more a chant does thrill…but a hymn with half-heard flow/deeply swells" in the first draft of Evening may "be a reference to the weariness one experiences at the end of the day" and that "the end of the poem implies the offering up of future suffering to the Divine Providence", which may recall the phrase "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" in Matthew 6:34. Tolkiensecretfire also suggests that some "other phrases in the poem" may be "oblique references to the Canticle of Simeon, known to Catholics as the Nunc Dimittis", which is "the traditional canticle associated with Completorium" and "is drawn from the words of Simeon in Luke 2:29-32". Tolkiensecretfire further suggests that the first version's beginning "perhaps recalls the long waiting of Simeon's own life (but also the long waiting of the People of Israel for a messiah)" and that the lines "a chant does thrill/Upward", "a hymn with half-heard flow/Deeply swells", and "sweet and still/Sings a peace too great to bear,/And a joy beyond all life" would be difficult "to interpret if they are not a reference to the divine peace prayed for by Simeon and in the prayer of Completorium". Tolkiensecretfire then notes that in the second version, "some of the religious imagery has been removed from the poem, a trend which increases through to the final draft", changing it "from an overtly religious poem, to one that can be read simply as a description of evening on a battlefield". Tolkiensecretfire suggests that the change may have been as a consequence of "the First World War" as the poem shifted "from having descriptions of a prayer service to more war-like imagery and conveying the feelings of a soldier at the end of a long day".