Compline, the Rosary and the Sea

Few prayers have been planted in as many corners of Catholic life as the Salve Regina. In the Divine Office it is one of the four seasonal antiphons of the Virgin sung at the end of Compline, assigned to the long stretch of the year from Trinity Sunday to the beginning of Advent, so that for half the year the church's last sung words of the day are addressed to the Queen of mercy. The monastic orders gave it particular devotion.

The Cistercians and Dominicans established the daily singing of the Salve after Compline in the thirteenth century, and the Dominican Salve procession became one of the order's signatures, while later custom added the prayer to the conclusion of the rosary, where most Catholics now meet it. The antiphon also went to sea. Medieval and early modern sailors sang the Salve Regina at evening as a service of its own, and the journal of Columbus's first voyage records the crew singing it in the evenings, one witness among many to a custom that made the antiphon the sailors' hymn of the Atlantic world. Its chant settings, the ornate solemn tone and the simple tone every congregation knows, carried it into polyphony, and composers from the Renaissance onward have set it continuously, making the Salve Regina one of the most composed texts in the history of Western music.