William Butler Yeats

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS  (1865-1939)

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.):

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two hundred years: his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland—to Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883 Yeats decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art school; but he soon left, to concentrate on poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism—not in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, that enabled him to strengthen the pattern and coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly coming up against this willful and sometimes baffling esotericism that he cultivated sometimes playfully and sometimes as though it were a convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common to William Blake and Percy Shelley and that sometimes go far back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers who know nothing of his system.

Yeats's childhood and early manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo; and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day; and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry that were vaguely pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthy—a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, although often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. The three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in chronological order—he was going to and fro among these places throughout his early life—and we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written under the influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling in a lyric otherwise wholly pre-Raphaelite in tone.

We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Shelley, and a little later Blake, were important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:

The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.

About the same time he was writing poems (e.g. The Stolen Child) deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. A little later—i.e., in the latter part of his first period—Dublin literary circles sent him to Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history, and to George Sigerson's and Douglas Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." Even when he plays with Neoplatonic ideas, as in The Rose of the World (also the product of the latter part of his early period), he can link them with Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "nineties" phase is productive of interesting poems. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, spoiled for some by overanthologizing, is nevertheless a fine poem of its kind: it is the clarity and control shown in the handling of the imagery that keeps all romantic fuzziness out of it and gives it its haunting quality. In The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland he makes something peculiarly effective out of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature. In The Madness of King Goll the disturbing sense of the otherness of the natural world drives the king mad. (Such contrasts are common in the early Yeats; in his later poetry he tries to resolve what he calls these "antinomies" in inclusive symbols; e.g., Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.)

It is important to realize that Yeats had a habit of revising his earlier poems in later printings, tightening up the language and getting rid of the more self-indulgent romantic imagery. The revised versions are found in his Collected Poems, which, therefore, present a somewhat muted picture of his poetic development. For the complete picture one should consult The Variorum Edition edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957).

It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiographical essays how he sought for a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading Yeats, the passive love-poet, to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books prompted his search for a more active stance, a more masculine style. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty . . . We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so fast as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volumes of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). The Folly of Being Comforted and Adam's Curse are from the former of them, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal. This is characteristic of his "second period."

By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. The affair is reflected in many of the poems of his second period, notably No Second Troy, published in The Green Helmet. He had also met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the Neoplatonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his poetry—e.g., at the end of A Prayer for My Daughter—and it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle classes, with their Philistine money grubbing, he detested, and for his ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them.

It was under Lady Gregory's influence that Yeats became involved in the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1899. This led to his active participation in problems of play production, which included political problems of censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theater business, management of men." All this had an effect on his style. The reactions of Dublin audiences did not encourage Yeats's trust in popular judgment, and his bitterness with the "Paudeens," middle-class shopkeepers—who seemed to him to be without any dignity, or understanding or nobility of spirit—produced some of the most effective poems of his third or middle period. He was now becoming more and more of a national figure. Three public controversies had moved him to anger and poetry; the first over the hounding of Parnell (To a Shade), the second over Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and the third over the Lane pictures (September 1913). In each, the cause for which he fought was defeated by the representatives of the Roman Catholic middle class, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, Yeats moved to England. Then came the Easter Rising (Easter 1916), mounted by members of the class and religion that had so long opposed him. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders of the rising) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats himself returned. To mark his new commitment, he refurbished, occupied, and renamed "Thoor Bayllylee" the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land that was to become one of the central symbols of his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State and served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the Protestant landed class.

Meanwhile Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the nineteenth-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial and formal, that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a metaphysical as well as an epigrammatic element, and this is seen in the later poems of his third period. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his search for a language of symbols and pursuing and pursuing his esoteric studies. Yeats married in 1917, and his wife proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which for several years she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision, but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some criticism decries attempts by those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning: but while it's true that some particular images do not yield all their significance to those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use of a code.

The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), from which the poems from Sailing to Byzantium through After Long Silence have been here selected, represent the mature Yeats at his very best—a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contraries that had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Though symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he returned to the turbulence after (if only partly as a result of) undergoing the Steinach operation to increase his sexual potency in 1934, and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. "I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth," he wrote in old age to a correspondent, and in one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Son of Sixpence." When he died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and power, makes him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language.

Marjorie Perloff on "Easter 1916"

 

 

 

 

—oOo—

The Arthurian Legend

(From George Sampson's Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd ed.).

XII. THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND

The mystery of Arthur's end is not darker than the mystery of his beginning. While the ancient tradition is everywhere, the facts and records are nowhere. The earliest English Arthurian literature is singularly meagre and undistinguished. The romantic exploitation of "the matter of Britain" was the achievement, mainly, of French writers, and, indeed, some critics would have us attach little importance to British influence on the development of the Arthurian legend. The "matter of Britain" very quickly became international property—a vast composite body of romantic tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality drew upon and used for their own purposes. Arthur was non-political and could be idealised without offence to any ruling family. The British king himself faded more and more into the background, and became, in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless "land of faëry". His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they, in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalization, and appear as natives of some region of fantasy, moving about in a golden atmosphere of illusion. The course of the story is too obscure to be made clear in a brief summary which must necessarily ignore the hints and half-tones that count for much in the total effect, and which can take no account of French, German and Italian contributions to the legend. Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows nothing whatever of Arthur. To find any mention of him earlier than the twelfth century we must turn to Wales, where, in a few obscure poems, a difficult prose story, and two dry Latin chronicles we find what appear to be the first written references, meagre and casual, but indicating a tradition already ancient. The earliest is in Historia Britonum, which, as we have seen (p. 9), dates from 679, though the existing recension of Nennius was made in the ninth century. The reference of Nennius to Arthur occurs in a very short account of the conflict that culminated in Mount Badon, usually dated 516, though some would put it as early as 470. Gildas, who was a youth in 516, also mentions Mount Badon; but the only hero he names is "Ambrosius Aurelianus". In Nennius the hero has become "The magnanimous Arthur", who was twelve times victorious, last of all at Mount Badon; but he is a military leader, not a king—or, perhaps, as the anthropologist Lord Raglan thinks, "a god of war".

The poems of the ancient Welsh bards have been discussed almost as fiercely as the poems of Ossian; yet there is no doubt that together with much of late and doubtful invention they contain something of indisputably ancient tradition. But the most celebrated of the early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin (sixth or seventh century?) never mention him; to the first to Urien, Lord of Rheged, is the most imposing figure among all the native warriors. There are, indeed, only five ancient poems that mention Arthur at all. The reference most significant to modern readers occurs in the Stanzas of the Graves contained in the Black Book of Caermarthen (twelfth century): "A grave there is for March (Mark), a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; a mystery is the grave of Arthur." Another stanza mentions both the fatal battle of Camlan and Bedwyr (Bedivere) , who shares with Kai (Kay)  pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable. Another Arthurian knight, Geraint, is the hero of a poem that appears both in The Black Book of Caermarthen and in the Red Book of Hergest (fourteenth century). One of the eighteen stanzas just mentions Arthur by name. The Chair of the Sovereign in The Book of Taliesin (thirteenth century) alludes obscurely to Arthur as a "Warrior sprung from two sources". Arthur, Kai and Bedwyr appear in another poem contained in The Black Book; but the deed celebrated in the almost incomprehensible lines of this poem are the deeds of Kai and Bedwyr. Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the only other Old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made to him, a most obscure piece of sixty lines contained in The Book of Taliesin. Here, as Matthew Arnold says, "The writer is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret". Arthur sets upon various expeditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them has as its object the rape of a cauldron belonging to the King of Hades. Ancient British poetry has nothing futher to tell us of this mysterious being, who is, even at a time so remote, a vague, impalpable figure of legend.

The most remarkable fragment of the existing early Welsh literature about Arthur is the prose romance of Kulhwch and Olwen, assigned by most authorities to the tenth century. It is one of the stories that Lady Charlotte Guest translated from the Red Book of Hergest and published in The Mabinogion (1838). Of the twelve "Mabinogion", or stories for  the young (the word has a special meaning but is loosely used), five deal with Arthurian themes. Two, Kullwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabury, are British; the other three are based on French originals. In The Dream of Rhonabury, Arthur and Kai apper, Mount Badon is mentioned, and the fatal battle of Camlan with Mordred is referred to in some detail. The Arthuro Kullwch and Olwen bears little resemblance to the mystic king of later legend, except in the magnitude of his warrior retinue, in which Kai and Bedwyr are leaders. Arthur, with his dog Cavall, joins  in the hunt for the boar Twrch Trwyth through Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, and his many adventures are clearly relics of ancient wonder-tales of bird and beast, wind and water. The wild and even monstrous Arthur of this legend is equally remote from Nennis and from Malory; but the charm of the story is someething that the long-winded Continental writers could not achieve.

The serious historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote a few years earlier than Geoffrey of Monmouth, refers to Arthur as a hero worthy to be celebrated in authentic history and not in idle fictions. He adds, "The sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere to be seen, whence ancient ballads fable that he is to come." Plainly, Arthur was already a popular tradition. The transformation of the British Arthru into a romantic hero of European renown was the result of contact between British and Norman culture. No doubt the Normans got their first knowledge of Arthurian story from Brittany; but the real contact was made in Britain itself, where the Normans had succeeded in establishing intimate relations with the Welsh. Thus the true father of the Arthurian legend is Geoffrey of Monmouth. How much he derived from ancient sources we shall probably never find out; but we can reasonably assume that he did not invent the fabric of the story, however fancifully he embroidered it. And, after all, the real point is not how much he invented, but how he used his matter, historical or legendary. Geoffrey had the art of making the improbable seem probable, and his ingenious blending of fact and fable not only gave his book a great success with readers, but made Arthur and Merlin the romantic property of literary Europe. So it has been urged thet we shoul take Geoffrey's compilation, not as a national history, but as a national epic, doing for Britain what the Aeneid did for Rome, and finding in the mythical Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, the name-giving founder of the British state. In such a story all the legends have their natural place. Geoffrey's History is thus the first Brut—for so in time the records of early British kings with this mythical starting-point came to be called. The first few books of Historia Regum Britanniae relate the deeds of Arthur's predecessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin appears on the scene, and romance begins to usurp the place of sober history. Arthur is Geoffrey's hero. He knows nothing of Tristam, Lancelot or the Holy Grail; but it was he who, in the Mordred and Guenevere episode, first sugggested the love-tragedy that was to become one of the world's imperishable romances.
In the Latin Life of Gildas written at about the time of Geoffrey's death there is a further interesting allusion. Arthur is described as being engaged in deadly feud with the King of Scotland, whom he finally kills; he subsequently comes into collision with Melwas, the wicked king of the "summer country" or Somerset, who had, unknown to him, abducted his wife Guenevere, and concealed her in the abbey of Glastonia. This seems to be the earliest appearance o the tradition which made Melwas (the Mellyagraunce of Malory) an abductor of Guenevere. Some of the Welsh traditions are used in Peacock's delightful story The Misfortunes of Elphin, Melwas and the abduction both appearing.

The value of the Arthurian story as matter for verse was first perceived in France; and the earliest surviving standard example of metrical narrative or romance derived directly or indirectly from Geoffrey is Li Romans de Brut by Wace, who, born in Jersey, lived at Caen and Bayeux, and completed his poem in 1155. Some of the matter is independent of Geoffrey's History. Thus, it is Wace, not Geoffrey, who first tells of the Round Table. The poem, 15,000 lines long, written in lightly rhyming verse and in a familiar language, was very popular. Wace's Brut, possibly in some form not now existing, or in some blend with other chronicles, provided the foundation of Layamon's Brut, the only English contrubution of any importance to Arthurian literature before the fourteenth century; for, so far, all the matter discussed is in Welsh or Latin or French. Layamon added something personal to the essntially English character of his style and matter, and he gives us as well details not to be found in Wace or Geoffrey. Thus, he amplifies the story of the Round Table and narrates the dream of Arthur, not to be found in Geoffrey or Wace, which foreshadows the treachery of Mordred and Guenevere, and disturbs the king with a sense of impending doom. Layamon's enormous and uncouth epic has the unique distinction of being the first celebration of "the matter of Britain" in the English tongue.

Not the least remarkable fact about the story of King Arthur is its rapid development as the centre of many gravitating stories, at first quite independent, but now permanently part of the great Arthurian system. Thus we have the stories of Merlin, of Gawain, of Lancelot, of Tristram, of Perceval, and of the Grail. A full account of these associated legends belongs to the history of French and German, rather than of English, literature, and is thus outside our scope. In origin Merlin may have been a Welsh wizard-bard, but he makes his first appearance in Geoffrey and quickly passes into French romance, from which he is transferred to English story. Gawain is the hero of more episodic romances than any other British knight; when he passes into French story he begins to assume his Malorian (and Tennysonian) lightness of character. He is the hero of the finest of all Middle English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and, as Gwalchmai, he plays a large part in the story called Peredur the Son of Evrawc, included in the Mabinogion. Peredur is Perceval, and the story comes from French romance. The love of Lancelot for Guenevere is now a central episode of the Arthurian tragedy, but Lancelot is actually a late-comer into the legend, and his story is told in French. The book to which Chaucer refers in The Nun's Priest's Tale and Dante in the famous passage of Inferno VI is perhaps the great prose Lancelot traditionally attributed to Walter Map (see p. 21). The Grail story is another complicated addition to the Arthurian cycle. Out of the quest for various talismans, no doubt a part of Celtic tradition, developed the story of Perceval, as told in French and German romances; and the "Grail", a primitive symbol, proved capable of semi-mystical religious interpretation, and came to be identified with the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. The story of Tristram and Iseult is probably the oldest of the subsidiary Arthurian legends, and we find the richest versions in fragments of French poems and fuller German compositions. The English literature of Tristram is very meagre. The whole story bears every mark of remote pagan and Celtic origin. Finally, as an example of how independent legends were caught into the great Arthurian system, let us note the Celtic fairy tale of Lanval, best known in the lay of Marie de France (c. 1175), a fascinatingly obscure personality who, possibly English, wrote in French. And as a postcript we may note that the sceptical twentieth century has nevertheless not lagged behind the Middle Ages or the Victorians in its devotion to King Arthur, as witness the Arthurian trilogy Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram (1917-27) by the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reshaping of the Grail legend in John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (1933), Charles Williams's Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Reign of the Summer Stars (1944), and T. H. White's trilogy The Once and Future King (1958), which inspired the American stage and film success Camelot.

 

Through all the various strains of Arthurian story we hear "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing"; and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its fables of the "little people", we owe much of the fairy-lore which has, thorugh Shakespeare and poets of lower degree, enriched the literature of England. Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have no doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of the Fairy world: 

In th' oldë dayës of the King Arthoúr,
Of which that Britons speken greet honóur,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen with hir joy companye
Dauncëd ful ofte in many a greneë mede. 

So let us believe with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in his unquestioned place as the supreme king of Romance.

 

 

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 The Arthurian tradition continues through the Renaissance and the Victorian age into the twentieth century. Here is John Boorman's film Excalibur (1981): https://jexmovie.com/watch_Excalibur_1981.html

 

La structure de La Mort le roi Artu

Anglo-Saxon Prose (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

(from Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature; London: Dent, 1937)

Origins. (12. Anglo-Saxon Prose. Alfred, Aelfric, Wulfstan). (1)

The breach between Anglo-Saxon and English poetry is everywhere apparent, and to pass from Cynewulf to Chaucer is to bridge a deep gulf. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is deliberately archaic. In order to produce a desired emotional state in its hearers, it reverts to traditional turns of expression, to words almost consecrated, as religion works its effects by the constantly recurring use of an ancient liturgy. This poetry is modelled on an earlier age of which the remoteness cannot now be determined. It retains many periphrases and locutions already obsolete, imitates and systematizes the disorder of primitive lyrical construction. The poetic form tends towards the past.

On the other hand, the tendency of the prose is towards observance of the rules of ordinary speech, unless it copies the Latin prose of the clerks. Its object is to instruct and inform, not to move, and since it thus educates the understanding, it necessarily turns to the future. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the prose writings of the Anglo-Saxons, which are much less curious than their poetry, are also much nearer ourselves. No revolution seems to separate Alfred's pages from those of Caxton, Aelfric's from Wyclif's. There is a change but no break. National and linguistic continuity is felt to exist; there almost seems to be a continuity in the thought as it is framed in much the same mould as now. While an Englishman has to make a quite considerable effort in order to read the verse of the Anglo-Saxons, he finds it comparatively easy to understand their prose.

If such facility be not marked in the oldest prose literature, this is because it is either of earlier compilation than any of the poetry extant—like the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, which were promulgated at the end of the seventh century, although our transcription dates only from the time of Alfred—or because some of this prose is more than half poetry and seems to be fragments of old epic tales. This character belongs to many passages of the chronicle usually attributed to the influence of King Alfred, of which we have distinct versions written by the religious of different monasteries, those of Winchester, Canterbury, Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough, the last-named having continued its narrative to the middle of the twelfth century. In this chronicle several references to early times, brief but impressively vehement, are pagan in feeling and emphasis and seem to date from the pre-Christian period. Even in the references to the eighth century there are a suddenness and a roughness in the narrative which betray that mental and grammatical habits were still empirical. It is continually necessary to complete the ellipses and to relate the pronouns to their proper subjects, as with a story told by a small child. For instance, the chronicler relates, as follows, the beginning of the struggle between Cynewulf and Sebright in 755:

This year Cynewulf took from Sebright his kingdom, and the councillors of the West Saxon [did as much], for unrighteous deeds, except Hamptonshire, and he [that is, Sebright] reigned there [that is, in Hampshire] until he slew the alderman who stayed longest with him. Then Cynewulf drove him to the forest of Andred, where he remained until a swain stabbed him at Privett, and he [that is, the swain] revenged the alderman Cambra.

The alderman is not named until he is mentioned for the second time.

This formless prose was succeeded at the end of the ninth century by a regular prose possessed of nearly all its essential parts. Since it is modelled on Latin texts, which are almost literally translated, it is very near English prose, as that was fixed, and also near French prose which was formed under the same masters.

Alfred, the glorious king of Wessex, was the pioneer of the prose-writers. The exclusively poetic or Latin literature which had hitherto flourished had emanated principally from the north-east, the country of the Angles, or from central Mercia. About 800, the supremacy was passing to the south-west, and the king of Wessex was tending toward the sovereignty of all the Germanic groups settled in the island. But the Danish invasions supervened, and with them the destruction of the centres of religion and letters. In the year 878 it seemed as though nothing would escape the invaders. It was then that the young King Alfred withdrew to Athelney in Somerset, formed there a nucleus of resistance, defeated the Danes, and won from them a treaty which left him the south of England while they remained masters of the old country of the Angles and northern Mercia.

After his victory, Alfred set himself to retrieve his country from the barbarism to which it had relapsed. A decadent and demoralized clergy had sunk into depths of ignorance. Alfred did for Wessex what Charlemagne, a hundred years earlier, had done for the country of the Franks: he endeavoured to teach the people, and to re-establish Christian discipline and culture, and to this end he brought foreign monks into his kingdom and reformed education. It was under his influence that the earlier poetic works, which had almost all been written in the Northumbrian dialect, were transcribed into the language of the West Saxons.

The part which the king himself took in this literary movement was considerable. His early education had been much neglected, and he had to learn before he could teach. He surrounded himself with scholars and learned men, learnt Latin after he was grown up, for Saxon had been the only language of his childhood, and had no sooner learnt it than he began to translate the works which seemed to him most apt to civilize his people. It was thus that he became the father of English prose-writers.

Whether in the works he inspired or in those he himself produced, an effort is apparent to regularize the old elliptical, abrupt style, with its obscurity and lack of continuity. Thus the Annals or Chronicles of Winchester, Alfred's capital town, were amplified and given smoothness until they are almost a continuous story, in which, for instance, the history of the king's war against the Danes can be read without any irritating difficulty in following the text.

Alfred himself is credited with a translation of the Universal History of Orosius, the compilation which made antiquity known to the Middle Ages. The task was difficult, for Orosius, a Spanish historian and theologian of the fifth century, writes an obscure, tortured Latin. Sometimes Alfred, as he himself says, translates 'word by word, sometimes meaning by meaning.' Although the literal translation had the most formative influence on prose, it is naturally the free version which most attracts us. Its very weaknesses are characteristic. Alfred, who does not know Latin very well and who has acquired no historical sense, aims at producing a work of pedagogy. The result is that he is often very inexact, and that, as he diverges from his author, he attains to a certain originality. While he deletes what seems to him of little use to his subjects, he also makes additions, especially in the geographical section. One of the stories he adds, that of Ohthere's sail along the shores of Scandinavia, is so simple and elementary in style that its vocabulary differs only slightly from modern English. The conclusion is that the spoken language was almost fixed.

Of Alfred's other translations, either made or ordered by him—Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Angles, the Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great, and the Consolation of Boethius (2)—it is the Boethius which is the most interesting. His choice of this book, which was again translated by Chaucer, is characteristic. Boethius has reproduced the Platonic and Stoic doctrines, coloured by Christianity and at their highest moral level—the distinction between true and false happiness, the lofty discussions on the existence of evil, on human liberty, and on divine prescience. He gives these abstractions a dramatic frame. Philosophy herself appears to him in his prison, and drives away the Muses, those prostitutes who were vainly seeking to console him. Thus he makes use of allegory, and although his style is not always pure and is often mannered, it is full of life and movement. His book could not but suffer gravely when it was translated by Alfred, who mistakes the meaning fairly frequently and is incapable of conveying the fine shades. When he renders the metrical passages, which have a classic elegance, his limitations obtrude themselves. But in nobility of sentiment he is the equal of the Latin author. He explains, as follows, his reasons for undertaking this arduous task:

As I have desired material for the exercise of my faculties that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if wisdom be not in them. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.

This king's literary work was, like his political work, interrupted for almost a century after his death in 901. The sketchy civilization of Wessex was once more scattered to the winds, and the clerks relapsed into ignorance and inertia. They were gradually redeemed thence, during the tenth century, by a reform of the monasteries which was inspired by the similar movement accomplished in France under the influence of the Benedictines. Religious houses were founded and organized in England, on the model of the abbeys of Cluny and Fleury, in which a strict rule enjoined intellectual work. This innovation was led by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his friend Aethelwold, 'the father of the monks.' Secular priests, not bound to celibacy, then abounded in the monasteries. They retained something of the patriarchal constitution which the Church of Ireland had originally given to their communities, and therewith very disorderly morals, much laziness, and gross superstition. The fact is proved by the so-called Blickling Homilies, a medley of canonical and uncanonical legends which swarm with strange arguments and allusions. It is to works of this kind that Aelfric alludes when he says: 'I have seen and heard many heresies in many an English book which unlearned men, in their simplicity, took for great wisdom.' Stories of the saints, replete with the marvellous, and the obsession that the end of the world was at hand, take up most space in this collection.

It was at this time that the strict rule of Saint Benedict was introduced. Morals once more became austere. The lives of the saints did indeed remain the principal subject of study and the marvellous continued to fill a large place in them, but the stories, as compared with their predecessors, were pure and even reasonable. Two men who with Alfred are the best writers of Anglo-Saxon prose are connected with this reform, Aelfric and Wulfstan.

Aelfric was a pupil of the monastic school which Aethelwold founded at Abingdon, and he wrote in the first years of the eleventh century. We owe to him a Colloquium for teaching Latin by conversation, and a vocabulary which was the first Latin-English dictionary. But he made his name by his Homilies, that is, his compilations and translations from the Fathers of the Church which form two series of forty sermons each, and commemorate the various saints venerated by the Anglo-Saxon Church.

Aelfric's prose, unlike that of Alfred, is written not to be read but to be spoken to the people, in the conventional tone of a priest delivering a sermon. It has therefore a rhythm which brings it near to verse: its sentences are divided into sections, more or less equivalent to the metrical line, and it is frequently alliterative. For this reason scholars were long uncertain whether to classify it as verse or prose. It celebrates the saints, as the scops once sang the deeds of warriors. This poetic prose marks a great advance on that of Alfred. It aims at beauty, measure and harmony. It is remarkably clear and finished. There is much less awkwardness and effort in the connection of phrases than in Alfred's writings. In fact, the author is consciously literate, even when he is using the vulgar tongue, and he excuses himself, with some shame, for the popular character of his translation of the Latin homilies, pleading the ignorance of his fellow-countrymen.

Wulfstan, who was Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, was first of all a preacher. The most remarkable of his homilies dates from 1012, the time when the English were suffering the ills of the Danish invasions. With deep feeling the homilist deplores the irreligion and immorality of his people to which he attributes their misfortunes, and he proclaims the near advent of the great chastiser, the Antichrist. Wulfstan is less of a finished artist than Aelfric, but the popular emphasis of his language gives it rich color and lively tones.

After Wulfstan all was over: the Antichrist came indeed. The Danes became masters of the country, and then, after a short interval of independence, the Anglo-Saxons were brought under the Norman yoke. Such prose writings as we have prove, however, that, even without the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose would have taken shape, modelling itself on Latin, and, with the exception of part of its vocabulary, would have become much what it was when in the fourteenth century it regained a place in literature.

It was poetry which was principally affected by the Conquest. The poetic form had outlived its time and had little life left in it. It was conventional and was getting further and further away from the real language of the people. It was fated to be abolished and superseded. The aesthetic ideal was to undergo a change, or rather a revolution. England was to learn to love verse of another kind, other cadences and new subjects. All the rich ornament which profusely decorated verse with a pomp still half barbaric was to go out of fashion. Poets were to shed their periphrases and ejaculations, and gradually to learn sobriety of style and an art almost unknown to them, that of stating facts clearly, grouping them, and inventing stories.




Notes

(1) Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, edited by C. W. M. Grein, R. P. Wülker, and H. Hecht, Leipzig and Hamburg, 1872 et seq. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, edited by J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (Oxford and Cambridge, 1858); Stopford Brooke, King Alfred as Educator of his People and Man of Letters (1901); H. Sweet, Selections from Aelfric's Homilies (Oxford, 1896); A. Napier, Wulfstan's Homilies (Berlin, 1883); B. Thorpe, Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vols. (Aelfric Society, 1844-6); C. L. White, Aelfric, a New Study of his Life and Writings (Yale Studies in English, 1898).

(2) King Alfred, Old English Version of Boethius, ed. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899).

The Fates of Men (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Poema anónimo anglosajón. Aparece en el Project Gutenberg eBook of Old English Poems. Tiene un cierto toque a la canción Who By Fire de Leonard Cohen.


Full often through the grace of God it happens
That man and wife to the world bring forth
A babe by birth; they brightly adorn it,
And tend it and teach it till the time comes on
With the passing of years when the young child’s limbs
Have grown in strength and sturdy grace.
It is fondled and fed by father and mother
And gladdened with gifts. God alone knows
What fate shall be his in the fast-moving years.
To one it chances in his childhood days
To be snatched away by sudden death
In woeful wise. The wolf shall devour him,
The hoary heath-dweller. Heart-sick with grief,
His mother shall mourn him; but man cannot change it.
One of hunger shall starve; one the storm shall drown.
One the spear shall pierce; one shall perish in war.
One shall lead his life without light in his eyes,
Shall feel his way fearing. Infirm in his step,
One his wounds shall bewail, his woeful pains—
Mournful in mind shall lament his fate.
One from the top of a tree in the woods
Without feathers shall fall, but he flies none the less,
Swoops in descent till he seems no longer
The forest tree’s fruit: at its foot on the ground
He sinks in silence, his soul departed—
On the roots now lies his lifeless body.
One shall fare afoot on far-away paths,
Shall bear on his back his burdensome load,
Tread the dewy track among tribes unfriendly
Amid foreign foemen. Few are alive
To welcome the wanderer. The woeful face
Of the hapless outcast is hateful to men.
One shall end life on the lofty gallows;
Dead shall he hang till the house of his soul,
His bloody body is broken and mangled:
His eyes shall be plucked by the plundering raven,
The sallow-hued spoiler, while soulless he lies,
And helpless to fight with his hands in defense
Against the grim thief. Gone is his life.
With his skin plucked off and his soul departed,
The body all bleached shall abide its fate;
The death-mist shall drown him— doomed to disgrace.
The body of one shall burn on the fire;
The flame shall feed on the fated man,
And death shall descend full sudden upon him
In the lurid glow. Loud weeps the mother
As her boy in the brands is burned to ashes.
One the sword shall slay as he sits in the mead-hall
Angry with ale; it shall end his life,
Wine-sated warrior: his words were too reckless!
One shall meet his death through the drinking of beer,
Maddened with mead, when no measure he sets
To the words of his mouth through wisdom of mind;
He shall lose his life in loathsome wise,
Shall shamefully suffer, shut off from joy,
And men shall know him by the name of self-slayer,
Shall deplore with their mouths the mead-drinker’s fall.
One his hardships of youth through the help of God
Overcomes and brings his burdens to naught,
And his age when it comes shall be crowned with joy;
He shall prosper in pleasure, in plenty and wealth,
With flourishing family and flowing mead—
For such worthy rewards may one well wish to live!
Thus many the fortunes the mighty Lord
All over the earth to everyone grants,
Dispenses powers as his pleasure shall lead him.
One is favored with fortune; one failure in life;
One pleasure in youth; one prowess in war,
The sternest of strife; one in striking and shooting
Earns his honors. And often in games
One is crafty and cunning. A clerk shall one be,
Weighted with wisdom. Wonderful skill
Is one granted to gain in the goldsmith’s art;
Full often he decks and adorns in glory
A great king’s noble, who gives him rewards,
Grants him broad lands, which he gladly receives.
One shall give pleasure to people assembled
On the benches at beer, shall bring to them mirth,
Where drinkers are draining their draughts of joy.
One holding his harp in his hands, at the feet
Of his lord shall sit and receive a reward;
Fast shall his fingers fly o’er the strings;
Daringly dancing and darting across,
With his nails he shall pluck them. His need is great.
One shall make tame the towering falcon,
The hawk on his hand, till the haughty bird
Grows quiet and gentle; jesses he makes him,
Feeds in fetters the feather-proud hawk,
The daring air-treader with daintiest morsels,
Till the falcon performs the feeder’s will:
Hooded and belled, he obeys his master,
Tamed and trained as his teacher desires.
Thus in wondrous wise the Warden of Glory
Through every land has allotted to men
Cunning and craft; his decrees go forth
To all men on earth of every race.
For the graces granted let us give him thanks—
For his manifold mercies to the men of earth.

El viento de tormenta

El viento de tormenta

Quién hay de ingenio tan potente y espíritu agudo
Que pueda decir quién empuja mi fuerza fiera
Por el camino del destino, cuando me alzo vengativo
Asolo la tierra, con voz atronadora
Arranco las casas de las gentes, y robo las maderas del palacio;
Humo gris se levanta sobre los tejados—en la tierra,
El ruido y gritos de muerte de los hombres. Sacudo
El bosque, los árboles florecidos, y tumbo los troncos,
Voy errante, con techo de agua, por amplio camino,
Impulsado por los poderes. A hombros llevo
El agua que ha envuelto alguna vez a todos
Los moradores de la tierra, a su carne y a su espíritu.
Dí qué es lo que me hace invisible,
O cómo me llamo yo, que llevo esta carga.

A veces me lanzo entre las olas agolpadas,
Para sorpresa de los hombres, y ando por el suelo profundo
Al que han ido los guerreros del mar. Las olas blancas azotan,
Con espuma como caballos, el océano se desgarra
El lago de la ballena ruge y rabia,
Olas salvajes golpean la orilla, lanzan rocas,
Arena, algas, agua, a los altos de los acantilados,
Cuando doy golpes, levanto a hombros el poder de las aguas
Y hago temblar las amplias profundidades.
Y no puedo escapar de mi lecho marino si no me lo permite
El que me guía en todos mis viajes. Dime, tú tan sabio,
¿Quién me separa del abrazo de los mares,
Cuando las aguas vuelven a estar tranquilas,
Y las olas en calma, que antes me cubrían?

A veces mi Amo me arrincona;
Me agarra y me sujeta, me encierra a la fuerza
Debajo de las tierras y los campos. Toda mi potencia
Se queda apretada en una cárcel estrecha y oscura,
Y tengo la tierra dura sentada a mis lomos.
No puedo huir del peso de esta tortura,
Pero sacudo las casas de piedra de los hombres:
Las grandes salas de banquetes, con adornos de cuerno, tiemblan
Las paredes se agitan, y se ciernen sobre los guerreros,
Retiemblan los techos, las ciudades.
El aire está tranquilo por encima de la tierra,
El mar medita, silencioso, hasta que me abro paso y salgo,
Al galope, por orden de mi amo,
Mi Señor, que en el principio de todo me impuso ataduras,
Las cadenas de la creación, para que no pudiese escapar
De su poder inflexible—mi guardián, mi guía.
A veces me lanzo hacia abajo, azoto las olas y las levanto,
Alzando aguas blancas, echando contra la orilla
A los mares grises como piedra, con sus sus flancos de espuma
Contra la muralla del acantilado, oscura masa que se alza
Sobre los montes de agua oscura que hay abajo,
Impulsados por el mar, se elevan uno contra otro
Como dos acantilados, en el camino de la costa—
Y se oye el grito de las quillas,
Los gemidos de los moradores del mar,
Los altos acantilados aguantan
La carga de los mares, el choque de las olas, el agua en guerra,
Cuando un tropel de tropas se agolpa en el promontorio,
Allí ha de luchar fieramente el barco
Cuando el mar le roba sus artes y su fuerza,
Y las almas de los hombres, aterrorizados
Entre la espuma blanca de las olas,
Allí se ve el poder al que obedezco
Cuando voy cruel por mi camino de destrucción—
¿Quién podrá contenerme?
A veces salgo a la carrera entre las nubes que llevo a caballo,
Vuelco las jarras de la lluvia negra,
Lleno de olas las corrientes, hago entrechocar las nubes
Con una voz potente, y saltan pedazos de luz,
Oleadas de nubes se levantan sobre los hombres sin concierto,
El trueno oscuro rueda con estrépito de batalla,
Y caen gotas oscuras de su seno, olas de lluvia de la nube guerrera,
Como caballería oscura de tormenta; el miedo sube como marea
En los corazones de los hombres, un terror creciente,
Las fortalezas mismas sucumben al temor, cuando esa horrible tropa
Se lanza a la destrucción, cuando espectros flotantes
Alzan espadas afiladas como la luz.
Necio es el que no teme entonces el golpe mortal,
Pero muere lo mismo, si el Señor
Lanza silbando una flecha desde el temporal,
Que cruzando la lluvia le atraviesa el corazón.
Pocos siguen con vida, si les alcanza el dardo que grita con la lluvia.
Yo soy quien da lugar a estos combates,
Cuando corriendo paso entre la muchedumbre de nubes,
Salgo con gran fuerza y vuelo sobre la superficie del agua.
En las alturas las tropas chocan con estruendo, y luego,
A cubierto por la noche, me hundo bajo el suelo,
Y me quito carga de los hombros,
Una vez más renovado por el poder de mi Señor.
Soy un sirviente poderoso. A veces lucho,
A veces espero bajo el suelo;
Otras veces vuelo hacia abajo y me hundo bajo el agua,
A veces causo peleas entre las nubes que van veloces,
Rápido y salvaje, viajo por todas partes. Dime mi nombre,
Y Quién me despierta de mi descanso,
O Quién me está sujetando cuando estoy callado.

_________


Es éste el primero (o los tres primeros, según otros) de los poemas-adivinanza anglosajones, recogidos hace unos mil años en el Libro de Exeter. Aquí hay una edición en red de las Exeter Book Riddles. Observan Legouis y Cazamian, en su Historia de la Literatura Inglesa, que este poema no deja de recordar a la Oda al Viento del Oeste de Shelley. Quizá sea en parte por lo aficionados que eran los anglosajones a dar voz o personificar a seres inanimados. Así por ejemplo en el Sueño de la Cruz, donde la cruz toma la palabra, o en El mensaje del esposo, donde habla la tablilla de madera donde se ha grabado el mensaje con runas. Las adivinanzas, perífrasis y expresiones indirectas están por todas partes en la poesía anglosajona, por ejemplo en las kenning. También recuerda este poema del viento, cómo no, al Apocalipsis, con sus huestes celestiales.

—oOo—

The Wanderer

The Wanderer 

An anonymous Old English poem

Often the lonely one longs for honors,
The grace of the Lord, though, grieved in his soul,
Over the waste of the waters far and wide he shall
Row with his hands through the rime-cold sea,
Travel the exile tracks: full determined is fate!
So the wanderer spake, his woes remembering,
His misfortunes in fighting and the fall of his kinsmen:

“Often alone at early dawn
I make my moan! Not a man now lives
To whom I can speak forth my heart and soul
And tell of its trials. In truth I know well
That there belongs to a lord an illustrious trait,
To fetter his feelings fast in his breast,
To keep his own counsel though cares oppress him.
The weary in heart against Fate has no help
Nor may the troubled in thought attempt to get aid.
Therefore the thane who is thinking of glory
Binds in his breast his bitterest thoughts.
So I fasten with fetters, confine in my breast
My sorrows of soul, though sick oft at heart,
In a foreign country far from my kinsmen.
I long ago laid my loyal patron
In sorrow under the sod; since then I have gone
Weary with winter-care over the wave’s foamy track,
In sadness have sought a solace to find
In the home and the hall of a host and ring-giver,
Who, mindful of mercy in the mead-hall free,
In kindness would comfort and care for me friendless,
Would treat me with tenderness. The tried man knows
How stern is sorrow, how distressing a comrade
For him who has few of friends and loved ones:
He trails the track of the exile; no treasure he has,
But heart-chilling frost— no fame upon earth.
He recalls his comrades and the costly hall-gifts
Of his gracious gold-friend, which he gave him in youth
To expend as he pleased: his pleasure has vanished!
He who lacks for long his lord’s advice,
His love and his wisdom, learns full well
How sorrow and slumber soothe together
The way-worn wanderer to welcome peace.
He seems in his sleep to see his lord;
He kisses and clasps him, and inclines on his knee
His hands and his head as in happier days
When he experienced the pleasure of his prince’s favors.
From his sleep then awakens the sorrowful wanderer;
He sees full before him the fallow waves,
The sea-birds bathing and beating their wings,
Frost and snow falling with freezing hail.
Then heavier grows the grief of his heart,
Sad after his dream; he sorrows anew.

His kinsmen’s memory he calls to his mind,
And eagerly greets it; in gladness he sees
His valiant comrades. Then they vanish away.
In the soul of a sailor no songs burst forth,
No familiar refrains. Fresh is his care
Who sends his soul o’er the sea full oft,
Over the welling waves his wearied heart.
Hence I may not marvel, when I am mindful of life,
That my sorrowing soul grows sick and dark,
When I look at the lives of lords and earls,
How they are suddenly snatched from the seats of their power,
In their princely pride. So passes this world,
And droops and dies each day and hour;
And no man is sage who knows not his share
Of winter in the world. The wise man is patient,
Not too hot in his heart, nor too hasty in words,
Nor too weak in war, nor unwise in his rashness,
Nor too forward nor fain, nor fearful of death,
Nor too eager and arrogant till he equal his boasting.
The wise man will wait with his words of boasting
Till, restraining his thoughts, he thoroughly knows
Where his vain words of vaunting eventually will lead him.
The sage man perceives how sorrowful it is
When all the wealth of the world lies wasted and scattered.
So now over the earth in every land
Stormed on by winds the walls are standing
Rimy with hoar-frost, and the roofs of the houses;
The wine-halls are wasted; far away are the rulers,
Deprived of their pleasure. All the proud ones have fallen,
The warriors by the wall: some war has borne off,
In its bloody embrace; some birds have carried
Over the high seas; to some the hoar wolf
Has dealt their death; some with dreary faces
By earls have been exiled in earth-caves to dwell:
So has wasted this world through the wisdom of God,
Till the proud one’s pleasure has perished utterly,
And the old work of the giants stands worthless and joyless.
He who the waste of this wall-stead wisely considers,
And looks down deep at the darkness of life,
Mournful in mind, remembers of old
Much struggle and spoil and speaks these words:
‘Where are the horses? Where are the heroes?
Where are the high treasure-givers?
Where are the proud pleasure-seekers? Where are the palace and its joys?
Alas the bright wine-cup! Alas the burnie-warriors!
Alas the prince’s pride! How passes the time
Under the shadow of night as it never had been!
Over the trusty troop now towers full high
A wall adorned with wondrous dragons.
The strength of the spear has destroyed the earls,
War-greedy weapons, Fatality inexorable;
And the storms strike down on the stony cliffs;
The snows descend and seize all the earth
In the dread of winter; then darkness comes
And dusky night-shade. Down from the north
The hated hail-storms beat on heroes with fury.
All on earth is irksome to man;
Oft changes the work of the fates, the world under the firmament.
Here treasure is fleeting; here true friends are fleeting;
Here comrades are fleeting; here kinsmen are fleeting.
All idle and empty the earth has become.’

 

So says the sage one in mind, as he sits and secretly ponders.
Good is the man who is true to his trust; never should he betray anger,
Divulge the rage of his heart till the remedy he knows
That quickly will quiet his spirit. The quest of honor is a noble pursuit;
Glory be to God on high, who grants us our salvation!”

"El viajero errante". Un poema anónimo de hace más de mil años, que me gusta incluir en mis clases de literatura anglosajona; esta traducción inglesa viene del Project Gutenberg eBook of Old English Poems, aunque cambio algún detalle. Aquí hay una traducción española. Contiene una de las visiones más memorables del fin del mundo y de la extinción de la raza humana; no tiene nada que envidiar, desde luego, al Last Man de Mary Shelley o a Darkness de Lord Byron—o a La peste escarlata de Jack London. Combina de modo quizá ilógico pero poéticamente efectivo la vejez de un hombre y el fin del mundo; la ruina y muerte de una civilización entera, con el exilio y la nostalgia del último superviviente de un tiempo pasado, que viaja por un mundo inhóspito que ya nada le ofrece, quedando sólo el consuelo del recuerdo y la ilusión del más allá. Aunque no puedo librarme de la sospecha de que el toque de esperanza celestial que cierra el poema es un añadido cristianizante a un poema todavía más pesimista y desengañado, un auténtico viajero de otros tiempos, el poema mismo, que viene realmente de un mundo ya moribundo y sin esperanza de volver a la vida plena. Es especialmente llamativa la manera en que, en un poema dentro del poema, el viajero errante se imagina a sí mismo como everyman, meditando como lo hará todo superviviente sobre la desaparición de todo lo que conocía, y sobre la faz que ahora ve claramente de un mundo hostil a las esperanzas y las empresas humanas.

Wayfaring Stranger

—oOo—

Bienvenida al Grado en Lenguas Modernas

History of the World

 

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The Origins of Political Order:






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