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.
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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:
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 | | 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)
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| | (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.)
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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.
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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
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