Anglo – saxon elegy or lyric -Old English Period- Rinjon notes

Anglo – saxon elegy or lyric -Old English Period

Though the stories of both lyric and heroic poetry were brought by the Anglo–saxons  from their native land , the tone in the two differs radically . While the heroic poetry deals with the exploits of heroes , the lyric poetry . The word “elegy” implies loss, and these elegies deal with the sense of loss .But this loss is not always any individual loss , as we find in Milton’s or Grey’s elegies .Their conclusion generally leads to philosophic contemplation on the universality of human suffering and of death .For their being a part of oral literature of pagan origin later written down by the Christian monks, these elegies have a great deal of Christian elements infused into them . Such lyrics include Deor’s Lament , The wanderer, The seafarer, Wife’s Complaint , Husband’s Message ,Wolf and Edawacer , and The Ruin.

Deor’s Lament presents bitterness of life in exile. A scop , Deor laments his being supplanted from his lord’s favour by another minstrel , Heorrenda . He laments the loss of his former glory and tries to console himself remembering other sorrows of the world .The poem is noted for its fine poetic craftsmanship and universality of theme. The end of each stanza , the poet adds:

"That grief passed away :so many this sorrow pass"

The elegiac mood of Deor appears more strongly in The wanderer. Here also the poet , though not a scop , regrets his loss of earlier fortune and happiness which followed the destruction of his lord’s house, until  he learns that suffering “fills the realm of earth”. The poem has lyrical intensity and it ends with Christian consolation.

Similar melancholic note is present in The Seafarer which is a dramatic monologue of a sailor who recounts the hardship and toil at as well as fascination for the life of sea – a note which recurs in the English  poetry of nineteenth century in Swinburne.

"How sick at hearts, o’er icy sea

Wretched I ranged the winte through ,

Bare of hoys and banishe from friends."

The same technique of dramatic monologue is followed in Wife’s Complaint, Husband’s message , and The Ruin. Wife’s Complaint, a beautiful love poem is a story of an estranged wife who, having been forced to live in a forest for the envious plotting of his kinsman , longs to meet her husband . Husband ‘s Message , which appears to be a sequel to the former , is remarkable for its use of Prosopoeia , formerly used by the classical poets .Here, the speaker is a wood where the husband engraves how he has been separated from his wife and promises to rejoin her across the sea. In wolf and  Eadwacer , a fragment of nineteen lines found in Exeter Book, a woman longs for her lover Wolf and expresses her detest for Eadwacer Who she is forced to live with.

The Ruin shows a departure in that the poem , unlike the earlier ones , commences with a note of universal loss instead of personal one . The beginning has an epical touch describing the ruin and decay  of a city once prosperous and glorious . Another poem , Solomon and Saturn passionately expresses a sense of transitoriness of earthly pleasure.

These purely lyrical and elegiac poetries apart, even the heroic poetry like Beowulf has many elegiac elements . As Beowulf approaches the den of the dragon , he is caught by a sense of his impending death , which “now must meet and touch the aged man .Later, sure that he is going to die having been mortally injured , Beowulf laments his not having a son:

"One profound regret I have that to a son

I may not give the armour I have worn

To bear after me."