The Columbia History of British Poetry Read Online Free Page B

poem concludes with a reference to the coming day of judgment, and the name Cynewulf spelled out in runes (probably the poet, perhaps the last reviser, or even a patron). Christ III (lines 8671699), based on a sermon by Caesarius of Arles, is full of fire, blasts of wind, and startling noise, like the doomsday it portrays. After the sinful are swallowed by hell, the poet turns to the blessed enjoying the perfect weather of paradise, a garden painted by many poets since.
The Dream of the Rood is the earliest extant example in any European vernacular of a dream vision poem. It is also one of the most appreciated, studied, and anthologized of Old English poems, appealing to modern tastes in its emphasis, not on human guilt and pain, but on divine forgiveness and generosity. The poem has no definite source, and

 

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its relationship to the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Brussels crosses is unclear. It is usually seen as having a four-part structure: a riddle-like vision of a strange object that turns out to be a cross; the object speaks, describing its origin and how Christ willingly and heroically mounted it for the sake of mankind; it exhorts the dreamer to tell others what he has seen; finally, the dreamer talks about his weariness with the world and his longing for heaven. Experience is organized in terms of polarities, with images of an ideal world opposing those of a repulsive one: the Cross as golden emblem of salvation, the Cross as bloody instrument of torture.
The extant mythological poems differ from one another in scale, focus, and degree of allusiveness, not in method or end. All the scriptural poems are concerned with the battle between good and evil, with the need to be faithful to one's lord; many have a strong figural or typological dimension, revealing a deep familiarity with parts of the Bible beyond the sections narrated; and all hold out to their hearers a promise of release from the desert of daily existence, this dark world of danger and inexplicable events.
Heroic Poetry
Heroic values pervade Old English verse. The ranks of familiar but deeply held ideas are reviewed and marshalled by poet after poet: unfading glory as preferable to life itself; loyalty as the cement holding society together; the importance of courage, strength, honor, generosity, self-control, and firmness of mind; a certain tolerance (from our perspective) for boasting and bragging, for the brutishness of armed coherent packs. The Old English poems in this group resemble one another not only in being speech-filled martial narratives, but in their focus on the words and actions of a hero (or heroine), a human being of passionate, unconquerable will, whose drive for glory on the field of battle raises him (or her) above the ordinary. The alternatives in this poetry are always starkly opposed to one another: the natural, instinctual, agreeable course (pay tribute rather than fight; let sleeping monsters lie; love your wife and forget about vengeance; marry that pagan and avoid martyrdom) brings disgrace; the learned, conditioned, disagreeable course brings praise. The hero exercises his individual free will and chooses the second. (And as Isaac Bashevis Singer said of free will: "We have to believe in it; we have no choice.")

 

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Three of the five Old English poems based on Germanic legend, works rich in action and dialogue, belong here: Beowulf (3182 lines), the first great English national epic, which does not mention a single Englishman; The Finnsburh Fragment (47 lines), a single (now lost) leaf; and Waldere (about 60 lines), two separate leaves. ( Widsith and Deor , lyrical monologues that allude, in a sometimes riddling way, to the world of epic, are treated under "wisdom poetry.") At least two works dealing with contemporary events belong here: The Battle of Brunanburh (73 lines), celebrating an English victory of 937; and The Battle of Maldon (325 lines), commemorating an English defeat of 991 and called by one of