she may have set up on the cliff, streamed over her head, and she saw the dim gleam of other lights which monks or nuns from her monastery had established in their cells along the coast, and heard over the roaring of the waves the cries of seamen shipwrecked in the bay below, she heard also, in the wind and the scream of the billows and the birds, the crying of such demons as Cuthbert put to flight from the rocky solitude of Farne. These things are no conjecture. All early English poetry is full of such thoughts, and they have entered into all later poetry. Not once, but many times in English verse The fishers have heard the water sprite, Whose screams forbode that wreck is nigh. Cynewulf saw the cloud-spirits of the rain and thunder stalking through the storm, and shooting their weapons. Baeda tells many a story of the celestial visitants seen at night descending from the stars; of the radiance of their ascending which St. Begu saw from Hackness—a cell founded by Hild on the very night when the soul of the great Abbess passed away; of the pillars of pure light that rose above the dead bodies of the saints to the roof of heaven, and were seen far and wide over England. The nature-myth became religious, as much a part of the daily thoughts and visions of Christian as it had been of heathen life. The same things pervade the poem of Genesis, the groundwork of which was at least done by Caedmon. The winds, and especially the north-east wind, which sends in so fierce a sea on Whitby, bear frost and bitter cold into the Hell of the Genesis. The feeling of the writer of the Exodus (one of the school of Caedmon) for the sea in tempest breaks forth again and again in the poem, in long leaping lines, which follow one another like the billows of the Northern Ocean. When Abraham in the Genesis ascends the "steep downs till he comes to the ring of the highland," and passes over the wolds to build the bale fire for Isaac, it may well be the moors westward of Whitby which the poet places in his verse; and when God speaks to Abraham of the stars to which He compares his descendants for multitude, He speaks of them as Caedmon saw them from the height of the abbey cliff." 1 Then in early morning comes an Eastern wind, And a fierce-cold frost.- Genesis, 1. 315. The passage is, however, in a part of the Genesis which, it is said, was not written by Caedmon. 2 Look upon the Heaven; tell its high-adornments, These in splendour now In such scenery the first English poem grew up, and, to complete the picture, we may imagine the long hall of the monastery at night filled with abbess or prior, monk and nun, with lay brethren and servants, with thegns and churls and merchants seeking hospitality, among the rest perhaps King Ecgfrith seated near his sister Ælfleda, for "kings and princes asked and received advice from Hild," — with bishops and saintly men who came to visit the place where they had been brought up, all gathered together, on each side of the huge fires, listening to Caedmon as he sang to them the paraphrase of the portion of Scripture allotted to him in the morning. Outside, the dark wind blew and shook the walls, and in the pauses of the harp and song the roar of the waves lent their deep tone to exalt the description of the Flood, which we may fairly give to Caedmon. We may well imagine how they - listened to the noise of the wind and rain and the thunder of the deep when they heard these lines — Then sent forth the Lord Heavy rain from heaven; let the ocean-streams, Strong was he and wroth Genesis, 1. 1371. It may be that this passage, as I said, is by Caedmon himself; and, if so, it illustrates how, at times, his poetic work arose above mere paraphrase. Whenever he is stirred by his subject, as when he describes the Creation, the Flood, the war of Abraham with the Kings of the East, and the sacrifice of Isaac, his style lifts, his metrical movement becomes full and varied, his vision of the thing clear, his expansion of his matter full of touches which, by belonging to the spirit and manners of his time, quicken his work into reality. Far through space are scattering their excelling loveliness! Brightly are they beaming over the broad sea. - Genesis, 1. 2189. I do not say that Caedmon wrote these lines, though it is possible. But they were written by one of his school, if not by him. And the writer may well have lived at Whitby. He certainly, I think, wrote upon the coast. I may add that to translate rûme "far through space " is perhaps more than I ought to do. "Far and wide," with the sense of "plenteousness" added to it, is the exact meaning. CHAPTER XVI 66 GENESIS A" GENESIS A, of which this chapter gives an account, and which we may with some probability allot, at least in part, to Caedmon, consists of the first 234 lines of the Genesis, and then of the lines from 852 to the close. The lines from 235. to 851 contain a second account of the Fall of man, and are called Genesis B. I shall treat them separately in the next chapter. Genesis A begins with an ascription of praise to the glorious King, the Guard of the skies, which resembles the words of the hymn Caedmon is said to have composed in his dream. But the words are not the same as those of the earlier song. The proper action of the poem is opened by a description of the brightness and joy-the gleam and dream of the angel hosts in obedience to the Lord, until the highest of the angels, "who that ill counsel first began to weave," swollen with "pride, and of malicious hatred all athirst, said that he would strive with God for the wide clearness of heaven and make him a home and lofty seat in the north part of the skies."1 Then God, filled with grim wrath, "made a woful dwelling for the false spirits howls of hell and hard pains, a joyless deep; furnished with everlasting night and crammed with sorrows; ""filled full of fire, and with frightful cold, with reek of smoke and ruddy flame. Grim was the guilt they had gathered against God: grim was the reward He gave them." For "He beat down their courage and bowed their pride, since He was embittered; and took from them peace and joy and their 1 Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain, Homeward with flying march where we possess Who intends to erect his throne Equal to ours, throughout the spacious North. - Par. Lost, Bk. v. glorious brightness." Then Caedmon, taking fire from his own thought of the wrath of God, describes the personal battle of God with His enemies, much as the poet describes the wrestling of Beowulf with Grendel. Milton makes the aspect alone of the Son of God enough to discomfit His foes, but Caedmon is less divine. In His grimness wrathful, Cut them off from home, Stern the mood He had; gripped He on His foes crushed them in His grasp; in His heart enraged. Genesis, 1. 60. When the battle is over, a far-off pathos comes into the tale. Caedmon, with more sympathy than Milton had, tells of the misery of the lost. "On a long way God drove the wretched ghosts: broken was all their boast, and bowed their strength, and their beauty shamed. In exile there they lived, fast bound in that dark dwelling. No more they sang their lofty song, but learned to know woe and care and sorrow and heavy pain, with darkness decked," as with a garment. Then in swift poetic change and contrast the pleasure and peace of heaven is set over against their misery – Then was sooth as ever soft society in heaven; 11. 78-81. It is the same contrast which is made in the last speech of God in the Prologue to Faust. Yet how changed in form is the modern conception, how laden with philosophy! Doch ihr, die ächten Göttersöhne Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schöne ! God ponders then, as in Milton, how He may replenish the empty seats of heaven, and looks forth on the vast abyss. In its description the echo of heathen thought is heard, and we may have in it the early English form of that universal Teutonic conception which is best represented by the Norse ginnûnga gap-the chasm of chaos, the world of dark mist out of whose waste and yawning gulfs all creation rose. It is well to note the word heolster-sceado - the shadow that hides the caverned gloom, Milton's "hollow dark"; indeed, that sense of intense blackness of darkness which is so characteristic of Northern poetry appears throughout the noble lines I translate all divided from the Lord, Deep and dim, outspread, Idle and unuseful. With His eyes upon it Gazed the mighty-minded King and He marked the place Lie delightless swart beneath the heaven, till the world became. at the first created · Brooding black in Ever-night, E'en the grass 2. Heaven and the Earth; and this roomful land But as yet the Earth— ungreen was now! Gloomed in Ever-night Far away and wide, waters rolling wan, Then the wondrous-bright o'er the heaving sea was borne let a-sundered be, light apart from gloom, saw the darkness dun o'er the spacious deep. Ocean veiled the world. o'er the ordered world and the Measurer drove He our shaping God On its footsteps ran — That the King Himself striding o'er the Earth, 1 They viewed the vast immeasurable Abyss 11. 103-155. Par. Lost, Bk. vii. This whirling of the winds in the vast depths of darkness is not in the Teutonic conception. That chasm of chasms is silent. But Milton has other phrases for Chaos. He calls it "the wasteful Deep,' ," "the waste, wide anarchy of Chaos, Damp and dark,' "the unvoyageable gulf obscure,' ""the dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,' "the vast Abrupt,' -a splendid phrase. The Void profound Of unessential Night receives him next, Par. Lost, Bk. ii. Most of these phrases-so receptive was Milton-belong to the Teutonic and not to the classical conception of the Dark beyond. 2" A yawning gap was there, and nowhere was the grass." - Volospà. |
