Читать книгу Halleck's New English Literature - Reuben Post Halleck - Страница 15

Cynewulf is the only great Anglo-Saxon poet who affixed his name to certain poems and thus settled the question of their authorship. We know nothing of his life except what we infer from his poetry. He was probably born near the middle of the eighth century, and it is not unlikely that he passed part of his youth as a thane of some noble. He became a man of wide learning, well skilled in "wordcraft" and in the Christian traditions of the time. Such learning could then hardly have been acquired outside of some monastery whither he may have retired.

[Illustration: ANGLO-SAXON MUSICIANS. Illuminated MS., British Museum.]

In variety, inventiveness, and lyrical qualities, his poetry shows an advance over the Caedmonian cycle. He has a poet's love for the beauty of the sun and the moon (heofon-condelle), for the dew and the rain, for the strife of the waves (holm-ðroece), for the steeds of the sea (sund-hengestas), and for the "all-green" (eal-gr=ene) earth. "For Cynewulf," says a critic, "'earth's crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.'"

Cynewulf has inserted his name in runic characters in four poems: Christ, Elene, Juliana, a story of a Christian martyr, and the least important, The Fates of the Apostles. The Christ, a poem on the Savior's Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the last day, sometimes suggests Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, and Milton's Paradise Lost. We see the—

"Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect,

With the bitter-biting jaws—school of burning creatures."[19]

Cynewulf closes the Christ with almost as beautiful a conception of Paradise as Dante's or Milton's—a conception that could never have occurred to a poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction of Christianity:—

" … Hunger is not there nor thirst,

Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun;

Neither cold nor care."[20]

Elene is a dramatic poem, named from its heroine, Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine. A vision of the cross bearing the inscription, "With this shalt thou conquer," appeared to Constantine before a victorious battle and caused him to send his mother to the Holy Land to discover the true cross. The story of her successful voyage is given in the poem Elene. The miraculous power of the true cross among counterfeits is shown in a way that suggests kinship with the fourteenth century miracle plays. A dead man is brought in contact with the first and the second cross, but the watchers see no divine manifestation until he touches the third cross, when he is restored to life.

Elene and the Dream of the Road, also probably written by Cynewulf, are an Anglo-Saxon apotheosis of the cross. Some of this Cynewulfian poetry is inscribed on the famous Ruthwell cross in Dumfriesshire.

Andreas and Phoenix.—Cynewulf is probably the author of Andreas, an unsigned poem of special excellence and dramatic power. The poem, "a romance of the sea," describes St. Andrew's voyage to Mermedonia to deliver St. Matthew from the savages. The Savior in disguise is the Pilot. The dialogue between him and St. Andrew is specially fine. The saint has all the admiration of a Viking for his unknown Pilot, who stands at the helm in a gale and manages the vessel as he would a thought.

Although the poet tells of a voyage in eastern seas, he is describing the German ocean:—

"Then was sorely troubled,

Sorely wrought the whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish,

Glode the great deep through; and the gray-backed gull

Slaughter-greedy wheeled. Dark the storm-sun grew,

Waxed the winds up, grinded waves;

Stirred the surges, groaned the cordage,

Wet with breaking sea."[21]

Cynewulf is also the probable author of the Phoenix, which is in part an adaptation of an old Latin poem. The Phoenix is the only Saxon poem that gives us the rich scenery of the South, in place of the stern northern landscape. He thus describes the land where this fabulous bird dwells:—

"Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove;

Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there.

Bright are there the blossoms …

In that home the hating foe houses not at all,

* * * * *

Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sick man's weary bed,

Nor the winter-whirling snow …

… but the liquid streamlets,

Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing,

Softly lap the land with their lovely floods."[22]