Stumbled on a new song (not new; new to me!) while listening to Radio Classica a classical station in Italian from Switzerland. Fauré’s ‘Cantique de Jean Racine”. I’ve made it one of my favourites on Apple Music in the version by the Cambridge Singers conducted by John Rutter.
I did my usual ‘little research’ and as I suspected ‘cantique’ is French for canticle. I then looked up canticle on my online Oxford and got this":
canticle | ˈkan(t)ək(ə)l | noun 1 a hymn or chant, typically with a biblical text, forming a regular part of a church service. 2 (Canticles or Canticle of Canticles) another name for Song of Songs (especially in the Vulgate Bible)origin Middle English: from Latin canticulum ‘little song’, diminutive of canticum, from canere ‘sing’.
But, it was the Latin base that drew my attention. I knew already the verb canto canere because it also means to recite poetry - making me suspect that poetry used to be sung. Which made me think that one of my favourite poets, Leonard Cohen, didn’t become a singer when he began to sing… (bear with me) but was just doing what poets had done at least since the Roman Empire, singing rather than speaking his poems. He remained a poet - which is a good thing as he certainly did not sing well.
I might copy this onto an occasional page of mine