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Essay

Caedmon’s Hymn:
The First English
Poet
Edward Hirsch | Issue 96
The link to the essay
https://imagejournal.org/article/caedmons-hymn-the-first-english-poet/
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ENGLISH POETRY BEGAN with a vision. It started with the

holy trance of a seventh-century figure called Caedmon, an
illiterate herdsman, who now stands at the top of the English
literary tradition as the initial Anglo-Saxon or Old English
poet of record, the first to compose Christian poetry in his
own language.
The story goes that Caedmon, who was employed by the
monastery of Whitby, invariably fled when it was his turn to
sing during a merry social feast. He was ashamed he had
never had any songs to contribute. But one night a voice
came to Caedmon in a dream and asked him to sing a song.
When Caedmon responded that he had no idea how to sing,
the voice commanded him to sing about the source of all
created things (“Sing to me the beginning of all things”).
“Thereupon,” as the monk known as the Venerable Bede tells
it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731),
“Caedmon began to sing verses which he had never heard
before in praise of God the creator.”
Bede embedded a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem in his
history. He probably translated it into Latin in order to make the
poem available to an international audience of clerics, but it’s also
possible that he was translating it from Latin. No one knows the
priority of these texts—in manuscripts, the English version survives
alongside Latin translations. Here is the Anglo-Saxon text, and then
a modern English translation of the inspired poem called
“Caedmon’s Hymn,” which was composed between 658 and 680.
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard
Meotodes meahte and his modgepanc,
weorc Wuldor-Fæder, swa he wundra gehwæs
ece Drihten or onstealde
He ærest sceop ielda bearnum
Heofon to hrofe halig Scyppend
ða middangeard moncynnes Weard,
ece Drihten æfter teode
firum foldan Frea ælmihtig
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Now we must praise the protector of the heavenly kingdom
the might of the measurer and his mind’s purpose,
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the work of the father of glory, as he for each of his wonders,

the eternal Lord, established a beginning.
He shaped first for the sons of the earth
heaven as a roof, the holy maker;
then the middle-world, mankind’s guardian,
the eternal Lord, made afterwards,
solid ground for men, the almighty Lord.
Caedmon’s dream was a sign he had become a poet. It was a signal
of poetic vocation. A clumsy, unschooled peasant is suddenly gifted
with the power of song. It is also possible, as later scholars have
speculated, that Caedmon was actually trained as a Germanic bard
or scop, but concealed his knowledge of pagan poetry from the
monks, who would have disapproved of what Bede calls “vain and
idle songs.” Caedmon took an oral form that was used to venerate
royalty and refashioned it to praise the Lord, God the monarch. His
hymn, his only surviving composition, is a praise poem to the
almighty, like the Latin canticle Benedicte, omnia opera domini,
which embraces all of creation (“O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye
the Lord: Praise him and magnify him forever”). It encapsulates the
basic form of Old English or Germanic poetry: two half-lines, each
containing two stressed and two or more unstressed syllables.
Another way of describing this is as one four-stress line with a
medial caesura. It stacks two or three alliterations per line and piles
up the epithets for God, who is guardian (“Weard”), measurer
(“Meotod”), glory-father (“Wuldor-Fæder”), eternal Lord (“ece
Drihten”), creator or holy maker (“Scyppend”), and almighty master
(“Frea ælmihtig”). What came to Caedmon in a dream was not just a
story, which he would have known already, but also a new prosody.
Caedmon connects the energy of language with the power of divine
spirit, and his religious poetry of praise inaugurates a tradition. It’s
possible, too, that Bede was promoting that tradition via Caedmon.
This way of connecting language to the divine looks backward to
Genesis 1 and forward to Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, and
Christopher Smart, who sings of the transcendent virtue of praise
itself. Here, for example, is stanza fifty of Smart’s
eighteenth-century poem of benediction, “A Song to David”:
PRAISE above all—for praise prevails;
Heap up the measure, load the scales,
And good to goodness add:
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The gen’rous soul her Savior aids,

But peevish obloquy degrades;
The Lord is great and glad.
Caedmon’s impulsive song looks forward to William Blake, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and even Walt Whitman, who embraces and
challenges us to embrace all the works of creation: “Divine I am
inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched
from” (“Song of Myself”). It stands behind W.H. Auden’s radiant
and intricate sonnet of instruction, “Anthem,” which begins: “Let us
praise our Maker, with true passion extol Him.” And it inspired
Denise Levertov’s poem “Caedmon,” which concludes with the
vision of a clumsy untutored clodhopper suddenly flaming with
inspiration: “nothing was burning,” Caedmon cries out, “nothing
but I, as that hand of fire / touched my lips and scorched my tongue
/ and pulled my voice / into the ring of the dance.”
“Now we must praise,” Caedmon instructs us, and thus touches
upon one of the primary and permanent impulses in poetry—a
calling to more life, a form of blessing, a way of cherishing a world
that shines out with radiant particularity.