For the stretch from Candlemas to Holy Week — the shortest of the four, and the only one that says goodbye.
Eight short lines and almost no request. It is mostly greeting — hail, hail, hail, hail — and it calls her four things in a row: queen, lady, root, gate. Then rejoice. Then, oddly, farewell, which no other prayer to her says.
The one ask comes last and is not for you: pray to Christ for us. It is the plainest statement in the four antiphons of what she is for. She is asked to ask.
The twelfth century, and nobody knows who wrote it. It is in manuscripts from the eleven hundreds, and it was fixed in its place at Compline by the Franciscans in the thirteenth, whose breviary is where the four-antiphon arrangement comes from. That is as far back as it can honestly be traced.
It was the antiphon for the weeks before Lent and through it, and it still is — the second of February to the Wednesday of Holy Week, after which Compline falls silent for three nights. Composers took to it because it is short and joyful in the middle of a penitential season: there are settings by Dufay, Palestrina and Victoria, among many. It is the least-known of the four, and the easiest to learn.