Write a note on Anglo-Saxon Elegiac poetry: --

It is customary to classify Old English Pagan poetry into epic and non epic poems. The
non-epic poetry is again subdivided into war poems and lyrical poems or personal or elegiac
poems. The latter group of Anglo-Saxon poems stands apart from the Anglo-Saxon epic or war
poems by virtue of the elegiac note. The Old English personal lyrics, generally known as elegies
do not mourn the death in the traditional sense as Milton’s Lycidas or Gray’s Elegy Written a in
a Country Churchyard. These elegies are not concerned with personal death but are deeply
stepped in bitterness of life in exile, futility and frailty of human life, helplessness before the
‘wyrd’ regret for the glory of the past, stillness of death and ruin, vanity of a worldly
achievement, intensely felt recollection of earlier joy, transience of human strength. These
elegies often reached the level of philosophic generalization, often Christian spirit in
contemplation of frailty of human life and the impermanence of a worldly happiness and
security. Some scholars hold the view that the Christian element in many of these elegies forms
the hub of the total artistic and philosophic design. The bulk of poems, Widsith, Husband’s
Message, Deor’s Lament, The Wanderer, The Sea-farer, The Wife’s Complaint, The Ruin, Wulf
and Eadwacer—contain an ingrained elegiac note of most elemental fatalism.

Deor’s Lament is regarded by some scholars as the earliest Old English lyric of exquisite
beauty. It is a 42 lines poem found in the Exeter Book. It was probably composed in 9 th or 10th
century. The poem is divided into seven unequal sections.

Deor seems to be a Saxon scop or minstrel who has fallen out of favour and consoles
himself by considering the past misfortunes of others such as Wayland the Smith, Theodoric,
and Hermanric. He says: --

‘His sorrow passed away, so also will mine.’

They all have overcome their sorrows. So he says: -

‘He overcome that so may I this’.

This has been regarded as the first specimen of lyrical elegiac poem.

The Widsith (a fragment of 143 lines) stands as the most ancient of the whole brood.
Whether part of an epic or a lyric pure, the poem offers an account of a supposed ‘scop’ (the
poet as a poetic persona?) wandering over faraway places and enumerating his ovations
everyone at the court of Hermonie (died in 395 A.D) and with the Gothic prices fighting Attila,
the Hun (died—453 A.D) and even the pre-historic mythical kings who surely should have
fought.

The Wonderer, consisting of hundred and fifteen lines has been an effort sisterly to the
Deor, but it articulates the motif of sad alienation more wonderfully. The poem tells us of another
nameless poet in distress. He is now alienated from his lord and patron and is confronted with
many sad experiences and nightmares. There is a vivid and desolate picture,

‘The dark waves, the frost and the snowfall mingled with hail’.
This description is the symbol of failure of human relationship C.W Kenedy has translated some
of the lines of this poem thus: --

‘Bitterness then is the bane of his wretchedness the longing for loved one; his grief is
reviewed’.

The Sea-farer that contains one hundred twenty lines belong to some Exeter Book is
perhaps the most original of the Old English elegiac lyrics. The poem may be divided into two
halves. The opening section of the poem ostensibly discusses the miseries and attractions of
life at sea, before moving by an abrupt transition to moral reflections on the transience of life
and ending in an explicitly Christian part, concluding with a prayer. Ezra Pound made a loose
but highly evocative translation of the first half of the poem. The structure and the coherence of
the relationship between its two halves have been much debated. Some critics regard the
didactic second part as an appendage to an earlier secular poem; others see the whole as an
allegorical representation of human exile from God on the sea of life.

The Wife’s Complaint consists of fifty three lines. It is a love poem and at the same time a
dramatic monologue. The wife has been separated from her husband and forced to live in a
forest by a malicious plotting of his kinsmen. In this poem the rare voice of a woman is heard
mourning at the absence of her banished husband. She can imagine of her husband’s mental
suffering in exile and puts the whole blame on their enemies.

The Husband’s Message consists of two parts, containing seventeen and thirty two lines
respectively. The poem makes the delightful use of prasopoeia—a rhetorical device, found in
classical literature where an inanimate object is personified. Here the speaker is a piece of
wood on which the letter is carved, It first tells the wife on his own life story and then it speaks of
the message carved on it. The husband reminds his wife of his promises made to her and tells
her how he has been separated from her by a feud and makes an exhortation to her to join him
across the sea. It is one of the few Anglo-Saxon poems without melancholy notes.

Wulf and Eadwacer is an example of dramatic monologue. It has been interpreted by

Bradley as the lament of a woman, now a captive in foreign land, yearning for her lover Wulf.
Eadwacer may be her hated husband or at least the man with whom she is forced to live against
her will. Bradley has rightly commented: --

‘Whether the subject of the poem be drawn from history or Teutonic legend or whether it may
be purely the invention of the poet. There seems to be no evidence to determine.’

He however has given us a beautiful translation of this poem: -

‘I waited for my wulf with far wondering longing when it was rainy weather and I sat tearful.’

The Ruin (found in the Exeter Book) of only forty one lines is a melancholy reflection upon
the ruins of what were once massive and great buildings of a great city. The poem describes the
result of the devastation of a city, and it is thought likely that the reference is to the Roman city
of Aquae-Sulis, the modern Bath which was destroyed by the Saxons in 573. The poem departs
from the usual Old English pattern in that the reader or bearer must himself supply the obvious
moral: all earthly things perish. The lyric is secular in nature. The poem strikes the romantic,
nostalgic mood.

Even some portions of the heroic epic like Beowulf are tinged with elegiac strain. This
poem is mournful not in its description, but in its general spirit. In the word of C.W Kenedy,
Beowulf contains ‘the conventional material of the Old English elegy in his lament for the glory
of the past.’

So it can be said that the elegiac poetry greatly flourished in the Anglo-Saxon period.
These poems thus are found to deal with certain universal and eternal human themes like
fatalism, nostalgia, the ravage of time, love of the wild and love for music. Critics have found
one common element in these poems—the element of Wyrd or fatew. We can easily guess that
more of the elegiac poems were written in this period—and are included in an anthology called
The Exeter Book. These poems leave upon us as an impression as the Oceanic poems of
Macpherson. Lueguis has rightly said that the Anglo-Saxon elegiac poems strike, perhaps more
truly, the authentic fragments of Celtic poetry, that note of lamentation at once personal and
human to which the name of Oceanic has since been given. CHAYAN DUTTA