Читать книгу Halleck's New English Literature - Reuben Post Halleck - Страница 16

Martial Spirit.—The love of war is very marked in Anglo-Saxon poetry. This characteristic might have been expected in the songs of a race that had withstood the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast Roman Empire.

Our study of Beowulf has already shown the intensity of the martial spirit in heathen times. These lines from the Fight at Finnsburg, dating from about the same time as Beowulf, have only the flash of the sword to lighten their gloom. They introduce the raven, for whom the Saxon felt it his duty to provide food on the battlefield:—

" … hraefen wandrode sweart and sealo-br=un; swurd-l=eoma st=od swylce eal Finns-buruh f=yrenu w=aere."

… the raven wandered

Swart and sallow-brown; the sword-flash stood

As if all Finnsburg were afire.

The love of war is almost as marked in the Christian poetry. There are vivid pictures of battle against the heathen and the enemies of God, as shown by the following selection from one of the poems of the Caedmonian cycle:—

"Helmeted men went from the holy burgh,

At the first reddening of dawn, to fight:

Loud stormed the din of shields.

For that rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood,

And the black raven, slaughter-greedy bird."[23]

Judith, a fragment of a religious poem, is aflame with the spirit of war. One of its lines tells how a bird of prey—

"Sang with its horny beak the song of war."

This very line aptly characterizes one of the emphatic qualities of

Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The poems often describe battle as if it were an enjoyable game. They mention the "Play of the spear" and speak of "putting to sleep with the sword," as if the din of war were in their ears a slumber melody.

One of the latest of Anglo-Saxon poems, The Battle of Brunanburh, 937, is a famous example of war poetry. We quote a few lines from Tennyson's excellent translation:—

"Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone,

Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us.

* * * * *

Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke

Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf

Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers."

Love of the Sea.—The Anglo-Saxon fondness for the sea has been noted, together with the fact that this characteristic has been transmitted to the more recent English poetry. Our forefathers rank among the best seamen that the world has ever known. Had they not loved to dare an unknown sea, English literature might not have existed, and the sun might never have risen on any English flag.

The scop sings thus of Beowulf's adventure on the North Sea:—

"Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest,

Dark grew the night, and northern the wind,

Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows."[24]

In the Seafarer, the scop also sings:—

"My mind now is set,

My heart's thought, on wide waters,

The home of the whale;

It wanders away

Beyond limits of land.

* * * * *

And stirs the mind's longing

To travel the way that is trackless."[25]

In the Andreas, the poet speaks of the ship in one of the most charming of Saxon similes:—

"Foaming Ocean beats our steed: full of speed this boat is;

Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave,

Likest to a bird."[26]

Some of the most striking Saxon epithets are applied to the sea. We may instance such a compound as =ar-ge-bland (=ar, "oar"; blendan, "to blend"), which conveys the idea of the companionship of the oar with the sea. From this compound, modern poets have borrowed their "oar-disturbéd sea," "oaréd sea," "oar-blending sea," and "oar-wedded sea." The Anglo-Saxon poets call the sun rising or setting in the sea the mere-candel. In Beowulf, mere-str=aeta, "sea-streets," are spoken of as if they were the easily traversed avenues of a town.

Figures of Rhetoric.—A special characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the rarity of similes. In Homer they are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon verse is too abrupt and rapid in the succession of images to employ the expanded simile. The long poem of Beowulf contains only five similes, and these are of the shorter kind. Two of them, the comparison of the light in Grendel's dwelling to the beams of the sun, and of a vessel to a flying bird, have been given in the original Anglo-Saxon on pages 16, 17. Other similes compare the light from Grendel's eyes to a flame, and the nails on his fingers to steel: while the most complete simile says that the sword, when bathed in the monster's poisonous blood, melted like ice.

On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and forcible metaphors, such as "wave-ropes" for ice, the "whale-road" or "swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy-necked floater" for a ship, the "war-adder" for an arrow, the "bone-house" for the body. The sword is said to sing a war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword, the sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately called the sword-game.

Parallelisms.—The repetition of the same ideas in slightly differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent. The author, wishing to make certain ideas emphatic, repeated them with varying phraseology. As the first sight of land is important to the sailor, the poet used four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's eyes on his voyage to Hrothgar: land, brimclifu, beorgas, saen=aessas (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories).

This passage from the Phoenix shows how repetition emphasizes the absence of disagreeable things:—

" … there may neither snow nor rain,

Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire,

Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall,

Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold,

Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower,

Do their wrong to any wight."[27]

The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by mentioning special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," "hoar frost," "bitter cold," "winter shower." The absence of heat is emphasized in the same way.

Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery.—A critic rightly says: "The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines of an old Celtic death song, we find three similes:—

"Black as the raven was his brow;

Sharp as a razor was his spear;

White as lime was his skin."

We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like this:—

"Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before they covered him with a turf."[28]

Celtic literature shows more exaggeration, more love of color, and a deeper appreciation of nature in her gentler aspects. The Celt could write:—

"More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain."[29]

King Arthur and his romantic Knights of the Round Table are Celtic heroes. Possibly the Celtic strain persisting in many of the Scotch people inspires lines like these in more modern times:—

"The corn-craik was chirming

His sad eerie cry [30]

And the wee stars were dreaming

Their path through the sky."

In order to produce a poet able to write both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet, the Celtic imagination must blend with the Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall see, this was accomplished by the Norman conquest.