The Columbia History of British Poetry (3 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 6
intellectual specificity that we detect in Eliot's "piaculative pence" or Auden's "cerebrotonic Cato." Each Old English poetic word or compound is an archetypal node, an aggregate of meaning, that lumps rather than dissects. Characteristically, the poetry produced works as much by synecdoche as by amplification.
Longfellow was impressed by the lines in
Beowulf
in which a man mourns his son's death on the gallows (one of the few non-French terms to survive in common law). As the father looks upon his child's former dwelling, the sense of loss seems to be expressed on a more than individual scale:
Gesyhð sorhcearig        on his suna bure,
winsele westne,     windge reste,
reote berofene       ridend swefað,
hæleð in hoðman;        nis þær hearpan sweg,
gomen in geardum,         swylce ðær iu wæron.
Gewiteð þonne on sealman,          sorhleoð gæleð
an æfter anum;    þuhte him eall to rum
wongas ond wicstede.                       (24552462)
(He gazes, sorrow-grieving, on his son's chamber, the deserted wine-hall, the resting-place open to the wind, robbed of joy. Riders sleep, men in the grave; there is no music of the harp, joy in the courts, as there once were. He goes then to his couch, sings a sorrow-song, the lonely one for the lone one; it seemed all too spacious to him, the fields and the dwelling-place.)
Even with the verse stripped of its rhythm, the words muted and tired in paraphrase of translation, this is still recognizably poetry, touching the deep wellsprings of grief and loneliness, the temporality and finitude of an indifferent world. The father's (and poet's) eye moves from the corpse, the lifeless "bone-house" riding on the gallows, to a windswept hall, its horsemen vanishedan emptied world and the awful spaciousness of things. The meaning of some words is uncertain (e.g.,
hoðman, reote, sealman
); the compression of
an æfter anum
untranslatable: 'the one for the other' but also 'the lonely one for the only one' (or vice versa); and the punctuation, modern and interpretive.
The poet's vagueness disturbs us. A recent translation turns "windswept resting-place" into "the draughty fire-place where the wind is chattering," a concrete, homey image that appeals to current taste. But the Anglo-Saxon poet's nonvisual and reticent "windswept resting-place" allowed his audience to recall other windy places: not only the
 
Page 7
"windswept walls" that form part of the "ruined hall" topos but also the wind-battered sea cliffs, the last defense of the land, and the "windy hall" beneath, in which Satan must endure eternity. The poet's sequence of images conveys with economy how, lacking one, the man bereft lacks the whole world. But why these unidentified "riders,'' why "harp-music"? The answer is that they, like hawk and mead-cup, are poetic shorthand, calling up a whole complex of ideas associated with the precariousness of earthly joy. Two hundred lines earlier, the
Beowulf
poet described another empty hall in terms of absence: "There is no delight of the harp, joy of the mirth-wood, no good hawk flies through the hall, nor does the swift horse pound the courtyard." The speaker of
The Wanderer
contemplates another ruined "wine-hall," buffeted by winds, and says: "Where has the horse gone? Where has the man gone? Where the treasure-giver? Where have the seats of banquets gone? Where are hall-joys?" The fact that any piece of Old English verse is likely to resemble others means that the individual poem could hold its punches, letting its resonant formulas make the connections. "Riders" and "harp" are loaded words, bearing traditional baggage that a poet had only to unpack, not invent.
A "
morning-cold
spear" in Old English poetry has little to do with degrees centigrade or time of day, and everything to do with misery, loneliness, and dread of attack, the emotional meaning of both terms in the compound. The poets paint vivid pictures of armies and arms on a battlefield where there is neither battle nor field, of violent storms at sea where there is nothing but sand and sunburnt desert. In the poem
Andreas
a tortured St. Andrew spends a night in prison. Outside winter rages:
      Snaw eorðan band
wintergeworpum;      weder coledon
heardum hægelscurum;      swylce hrim ond forst,
hare hildstapan,      hæleða eðel
lucon, leoda gesetu.      Land wæron freorig
cealdum cylegicelum,      clang wæteres þrym,
ofer eastreamas       is brycgade,
blæce brimrade. Bliðheort wunode . . .
                                                         (12551262)
(Snow bound the earth with winter-drifts; the air grew chill with fierce hailstorms; likewise rime and frost, hoary battle-stalkers, locked the homelands
 
Page 8
of men, the seats of nations. Lands were freezing with cold icicles, the might of the water congealed, ice bridged over the water-streams, the dark wave-road. Joyful in heart dwelt [Andrew] . . .)
There is no hint of this weather in the known Latin and Greek sources or in the Old English prose life of St. Andrew. It is winter in the poem because the saint, alone and locked in "cold fetters" beneath the earth, is enduring a night of "winter-cold" torments. The poet revives (or literalizes) a dead metaphor (snow binding the earth, ice fettering the sea); his "hoary battle-stalkers'' (= rime and frost; a nonce compound playing on the formula-type
har hilderinc
'hoary battle-warrior') with their "storm-hard" weapons imitate the saint's assailants. Even the syntax gets into the act: when rime and frost
lock
the homelands and seats of men, the verb (
lucon
) is placed so that it literally locks the two together; when ice
bridges
the seas, the verb (
brycgade
), in final position yet anticipating the alliteration of the next line, itself acts as a bridge, joining the sea terms on either side, syntax and sound mirroring the sense. In the final line a
blæc
'dark' sea alliterates with the strongly contrasting adjective (
blið
'joyous'), from which it is separated by a full syntactic stop; this juxtaposition of opposites not only underlines the saint's constancy under duress, it also embodies a conviction, expressed throughout Old English poetry, that sudden reversals of fortune characterize life in this world. Formal sophistication and formulaic verse are not mutually exclusive.
The poetry of Anglo-Saxon England, both in Latin and the vernacular, reveals a pervasive fondness for riddles, for making the clear obscure, for elucidating by obfuscation. The much-praised "swan" riddle plays with the notion that the feathers of the swan, silent when the bird walks or swims, make beautiful music when it is in flight:
Hrægl min swigað        þonne ic hrusan trede,
oþþe þa wic buge,        oþþe wado drefe.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
        Frætwe mine
swogað hlude        ond swinsiað,
torhte singað,        þonne ic getenge ne beom
flode ond foldan,        ferende gæst.
(My garment is silent when I step on the earth, or rest in the dwelling, or ruffle the sea. . . . My trappings resound loudly and make melody, brightly sing, when I am not touching water and land, a traveling spirit.)

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