Gaude quod primam te sors mihi fecit amicam.
Me turbat graviter qui crebro defluit ymber,
nam vereor nostris hunc vindictam dare culpis.
Rejoice, for fate has made you my first sweetheart! The rain that comes down so often disturbs me greatly, for I fear it takes vengeance for our transgressions.
The commentaries suggest possible hidden meanings for the word imber (“rain”): that it refers to the river Regen (Regen = “rain” in German) which flows into the Danube at Regensburg (Traill/Haynes, p. 162); or that it stands for (part of) the name of a female authority figure at the correspondent’s monastery (like Regintrud or Reinhild). Whether we read it in this way or not, it is the first of numerous poems in the exchange which hint at actual physical meetings and assignations between correspondents. Paravicini is skeptical that any such meetings ever took place (1979, pp. 10-11). Newman writes the following, about the Regensburg community and a few other similar exchanges:
I will consider such poetry as the artefact of an emotional community, one in which learning Latin, imitating Ovid, and cultivating a kind of high-minded but flirtatious cross-gender friendship went hand in hand. This emotional community was a fragile one, not sustainable over the long term, because it made such outrageously high demands. Its elite members were required to maintain their vowed chastity or virginity, devote their lives to the service of God, attest to the disinterested purity of their friendships, and at the same time engage in a playful and competitive literary game whose very essence was the composition of amorous verse. This was hard enough for young and middle-aged clerics. Many of them were rhetorically bisexual, addressing love poems to boys as well as women, and if self discipline failed them [male clerics], they could break their vows of chastity without getting caught. But of girls and young women–cloistered, at risk of pregnancy, and at even greater risk of damaging their vitally important fama, their reputation for virtue–the game was an emotional high-wire act that may have had more casualties than we know. (2016, p. xvi-xvii)
Sagemære 