The Columbia History of British Poetry (5 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 14
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.")
 
Page 15
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 its many admirers "the only purely heroic poem extant in Old English."
The Anglo-Saxons acquired another heroic past in the lives of Christian apostles, martyrs, and saints. Here the vital relationship between loyal follower and gift-giving lord takes on new meaning. Heroic poems based on Christian legend include two in the Vercelli Book:
Andreas
(1772 lines), based on the apocryphal Deeds of St. Andrew and St. Matthew in the land of the cannibals; and
Elene
(1321 lines), signed by Cynewulf and rendering the Latin Deeds of St. Cyriacus; and three in the Exeter Book:
Juliana
(731 lines), also signed by Cynewulf and the only real saint's life of the group;
Guthlac A
(818 lines), a meditation on the life of this Mercian nobleman and native English saint; and
Guthlac B
(561 lines), based on the Latin life by Felix of Crowland (ca. 740) and relating the saint's final illness. The saint, no less than the secular hero, draws attention to a world in which bad fortune is better than good, and life is won by its loss; for the former it is heaven, for the latter, poetry, that makes going down to defeat worthwhile.
Woody Allen's warning to students in
Annie Hall
"not to take courses where they make you read
Beowulf
" is evidence at least that the poem is recognized by popular culture. (The name Gower would not work half so well.) We are, as usual, ignorant of the reception
Beowulf
had among the Anglo-Saxons, its date, its authorship, how widely it was known, or how highly it was regarded. The poem is a blend of folktale fantasy and epic gravity. Twice Beowulf (otherwise unknown) dispatches manlike, man-eating monsters; many years later, he kills a fire-breathing dragon and gets himself killed. The poet draws upon some twenty legends in constructing his northern heroic age; he presents such an internally consistent picture of Scandinavian society
 
Page 16
around
A.D.
500 that his illusion of historical truth has been taken for the reality.
Beowulf says and does all the right heroic things: "Each of us must experience the end of life in the world," he tells the quaking Danes; "let him who is permitted achieve fame before death. That is for a slain warrior the best there is." Beowulf's victories over his opponents are praised by the narrator and also by other actors in the poem: he was "the strongest of warriors," ''the strongest in might on that day of this life"; his loyalty, munificence, wisdom, and nobility are extolled, along with the formal speeches in which he makes his qualities known. "He held to his high destiny," says Wiglaf of the dead Beowulf, "of all men in the world he was the most glorious warrior." The last word in the poem is uttered by Beowulf's mourners, who commend their slain leader as "most intent on glory."
Heroic literature is temporarily out of fashion, at least in the West. We no longer assume that fighting is glorious or fun, or that
hero
and
warrior
are synonymous terms. If
Beowulf
is widely regarded today as the first great masterpiece of English poetry, it probably has less to do with its hero's might than its poet's melancholy. The poem's heroic fellowship is precarious, a bright hall stalked by menacing shadows. Scenes of rejoicing are swiftly undercut by forecasts of disaster; alliterative pairings like
æfter wiste . . . wop
'after the feast . . . lamentation' and
gyrn æfter gomene
'sorrow after joy' are dark, mocking refrains. The noble history related turns out to be the stuff that fantasies of younger brothers are made of: the fall of a leader, an underdog's defiant resistance, the automaticity of revenge (called by Auden the earth's only perpetual motion machine).
The Finnsburh Fragment
deals in a vivid, close-up way with the same battle at Finn's stronghold sung of by the "scop" in
Beowulf
's Heorot. The poet applauds the young warriors for repaying their lord's bright mead so abundantly in battle, just as a retainer in
Beowulf
urged his comrades to remember their vows at the mead-drinking, and a soldier in
The Battle of Maldon
reminded his companions of their hall-vows "over mead, on the bench."
Waldere
, treating the same legend that survives in the Latin verse epic
Waltharius
, provides examples of, among other things, the tension between heroic ideas and human affection, weapons with a legendary past, stolen treasure, the hero's headlong drive for everlasting glory, and the role of women in Old English poetry.
 
Page 17
Brunanburh
and
Maldon
, poems on actual tenth-century battles fought by contemporary kings and great magnates, adapt the heroic mode to patriotic ends. The first, one of the most familiar of all Old English poems through Tennyson's translation, sees no unresolvable contradiction between piety and the heroic life: its glory-filled battle, red with blood and illuminated by God's rising and setting sun, is viewed from a historical perspective reminiscent of Manifest Destiny.
Maldon
commemorates a bad day: the general fell, part of his army ran away, and the English lost. Nevertheless, some Anglo-Saxon poet turned this debacle into "the most heroic of poems," one famed for its "invincible profession of heroic faith." Byrhtnoth, the leader, chooses to fight rather than pay tribute, to bloody the Vikings rather than watch them sail off into the sunrise; after he falls, his loyal retainers choose to stay and die rather than flee and live. "Remember" is the first word spoken by a retainer in
Maldon
; one by one, those left on the field revive within themselves their lord's heroic song. The words uttered by one of them"Spirit must be the firmer, heart the bolder, courage the greater, as our strength lessens"are probably the most frequently quoted in all Old English poetry.
Not surprisingly, the Old English poems about the deeds of the "soldiers of Christ" are less well known, even though they tell highly dramatic, even rip-roaring stories. In
Andreas
St. Andrew embarks on an eventful sea journey to free his fellow apostle Matthew from the man-eating Mermedonians, undergoes torture, and by means of a miraculous flood converts his captors to Christianity. Most commentary on the poem is concerned with its possible verbal borrowings from
Beowulf
(or vice versa; the jury is still out). The differences between the two works, however, are just as striking. The action of
Beowulf
takes place in history, with eternity impinging only at moments; its tone is measured and full of regret. The action of
Andreas
is abstract and symbolic, performed on a cosmic stage; its tone, joyful and excited. Exaggerated violence and ecstasy are cultivated at every turn. Christ, as king, creates his
comitatus
, twelve companions serving as "thanes of the prince"; he determines their "lot." Andrew converting the heathen is the historical apostle but also a warrior in the cosmic battle between Christ and Satan. When the saint resolves to go alone to the land of the cannibals, his own retainers, protesting that if they did not accompany him they, lordless, would be welcome nowhere, make the right heroic choice. Yet in the dual vision of the poem, an act that occurs once is seen as having eternally occurred.
 
Page 18
In the other poetic saints' lives, too, literal statements of loyalty, literal battles, literal conversions, somehow always end up portending moral, eternal, and spiritual archetypes.
Elene
tells of the search for the true Cross in Jerusalem by Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine (who was granted a vision of the Cross as a sign of victory); it is also the story of Judas, the Jew who eventually assisted Helena in finding the Cross and became, as Cyriacus, bishop of Jerusalem. Both Constantine's opening battle with the Goths and his mother's excessively martial sea voyage are sometimes removed from their context and admired as set pieces; yet in
Elene
, the warfare of the emperor and the archaeological mission of his "war-queen" mother are much of the time indistinguishable from the Church Militant battling the unbelievers.
In
Juliana
a wicked governor seeks the saint in marriage; she, devoted to Christ, spurns him. The Old English Juliana is not the somewhat deceitful beauty of the Latin life but a fervent Christian; her fiancé, no longer the soul of sweet reasonableness, has become a follower of Satan; the war between the retainers of heaven and of hell gives structure and meaning to this most abstract of poems. A similar struggle between saint and devil is at the heart of
Guthlac A
, the first of two consecutive poems in the Exeter Book about this English ascetic (ca. 674714). Having abandoned his former warrior life, Guthlac now spends a lot of time in the fens defending himself and his dwelling from demonic assailants.
Guthlac B
depicts death, a "slaughter-greedy warrior" and a "cruel loner," rushing upon the saint "with greedy grasps," unlocking his "treasure-hoard of life with treacherous keys," and finally, "stinging'' the saint with "deadly arrows." Death's victory turns out to be Guthlac'shis soul goes forth, encased in light and melody, into heavenly glory, a reward from his Lord for heroic steadfastness and strength. It is different from Beowulf's end, but not very.
Wisdom Poetry
"A man must be firm in wisdom and measured, wise in heart, shrewd in thoughts, eager for wisdom, so he can get his share of happiness among men," observes a father to his son in the poem called
Precepts
. "I intend to teach people all the time," warns the narrator of
Judgment Day I
. "Learn this teaching," commands
The Order of the World
. These remarks are characteristic of the large and somewhat amorphous category of wisdom poetry. Its concerns are with the nature of the world, what life
 
Page 19
is, how it varies, how it works, its rules of conduct, how to succeed. The individual poems in this group are often hortatory and assertive, with a preference for the
deop, deorc, dimm, dierne
, and
diegol
, the 'deep,' 'dark,' 'obscure,' 'hidden,' and 'secret.' Anglo-Saxon wisdom comes in the form of poetic catalogues, charms, maxims and proverbs, riddles, allegories, dialogues, andperhaps most distinctivelyreflective, admonitory poems, sometimes spoken by an "I" who relates his or her life experience. These latter poems, which include such favorites as
The Wanderer, The Seafarer
(famously, if partially, translated by Ezra Pound),
The Ruin, Deor
, and
Widsith
, occupy the second half of the Exeter Book. One such poem might be a quirk; twenty or so suggest a taste.
The works just mentioned, along with
The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Husband's Message, The Riming Poem
, and
Resignation B
, are urgent, emotional compositions, each claiming to report the speaker's true experience. These "elegies," as they are sometimes called, review the brevity of human life and joy, the transience of the worldhow time condemns itself, all man's endeavors, and all his edifices. The poets look back at a vanished world, at heroes who sought praise for their heroic deeds "until all departed, light and life together"; they tell us of loss, suffering, and mortality, and how the mind can steel itself against impermanence by not putting trust "where moth and rust doth corrupt." The poems tend to begin in vehement spontaneity, the outpouring of personal grief, and end in generalizations, as the speaker gradually converts raw experience into the perfect formality of wisdom. For some reason, the two poems that tell of longing and abandonment in a woman's voice do not offer the consolation of eternity, of a better, more enduring home. Three "elegies'' are distinctive in form:
The Riming Poem
is, as its modern title suggests, the first English poem to use end rhyme consistently. The haunting
Wulf and Eadwacer
has a refrain; the only other Old English poem so equipped is
Deor
, whose repeated "That passed over; so can this" seems to turn every sorrow told into an exemplum of misery overcome. The consolation is transience itself.
Wisdom poetry circles repetitively around a core of related themes: the dangers of boasting, pride, and drink; man's ignorance, God's power; the devil's arrows and man's urgent need to fortify his mind. Most poems end with an admonishment to live well (i.e., righteously) in view of the eternal consequences of not doing so; some paint a cautionary picture of the terrors and stench of the wicked in the next world.

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