Drinking Beowulf’s Blood: The Influence of Old English on Contemporary Poetry
For an English speaker, Old English is not particularly difficult to grasp. At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking it a completely alien language. But learn a few basic rules of Germanic pronunciation, get used to the odd Norse letter in the mix, and it gradually becomes more like English: not Modern English perhaps, nor even ‘Middle’ enough for a medievalist to be comfortable without a dictionary to hand, yet definitely of these isles. Indeed, part of the excitement of reading and reinventing Old English verse has to be this painstaking decoding of runic symbols, the sense of being ‘let in’ on a mystery known only to the earliest English literati.
Linguistic nostalgia aside, poetic heritage was the prime incentive for twentieth-century poets Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden to get to grips with Old English. Nicholas Howe, in his essay ‘Praise and Lament: The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill and Gunn’[1], quotes Auden’s recollection of his first encounter with Old English during an Oxford undergraduate lecture given by J.R.R. Tolkien:
I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage from Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.
Never a great scholar, Auden was nonetheless conversant enough with the sounds of Old English poetry to amply reflect that influence in his own work. The American poet Ezra Pound was also deeply influenced by his Anglo-Saxon tutor at Hamilton, Professor Ibbotson (known affectionately as ‘Bib’), and once claimed that ‘the Cantos started in a talk with “Bib”[2]. Hugh Kenner plays down this early influence as something ‘quirky’ and quickly ‘abandoned’,[3] but other critics have seen it as pivotal in his development as a poet. Fred C. Robinson is certainly convinced of this, describing Pound’s translation of ‘The Seafarer’, when viewed alongside ‘Canto I’, as constituting ‘Pound’s poetics in a nutshell’.[4] Reading Canto I in that light, it’s clear that rhythm plays a considerable role in this influence, as does the use of the OE kenning, discussed further below. Howe too, investigating W.H. Auden’s influences, recognises something similar in that poet’s openness to listening to the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon:
For what Auden as a young poet most needed from Old English was what he could learn through his ears. His initial, revelatory encounter with the poetry was aural, and thus emphasized such acoustic features as alliteration, patterns of accentual stress, and use of the caesura.[5]
These ‘acoustic features’ can also be found in the work of more recent poets, drawn to such devices either through studying OE literature themselves — usually at university, though some are self-taught — or by reading other poets already under its heady influence. Examples include poets from both avant and mainstream traditions, such as Geoffrey Hill, Jane Draycott, Gordon Wardman, David Jones, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Edwin Morgan, Bernard O’Donoghue, and even the unlikely figure of Paul Muldoon, whose translation of ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, according to Anglo-Saxon scholar and writer Chris Jones, ‘neither Hibernicizes nor archaizes, but renders the Hymn into a fluent, modern idiom’.[6] There are more names than I have room to mention here, some with only fleeting links, others with a lifelong interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry and its descendants. Witness, for instance, the continuing appeal of classics of medieval literature such as ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, an epic poem influenced by the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition and most recently translated by Simon Armitage, or ‘Pearl’, daringly reinvented by the late Barry MacSweeney as a contemporary masterpiece. But I would like to explore the work of some of the poets directly influenced by Old English literature, and try to pinpoint why Anglo-Saxon has been and continues to be — in part at least — a source of creative inspiration for them.
For some, the well-known Cambridge poet and avant-gardist, J.H. Prynne, may be a surprise addition to a list of poets influenced by older versions of English. Yet he has been known to slip such references into his work, sometimes in passing, sometimes more centrally. One early poem, ‘Frost and Snow, Falling’, conjures up a desolate wintry landscape strongly reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon elegy ‘The Wanderer’, with a man trudging through it: ‘The wanderer/with his thick staff: who cares whether he’s an illiterate/scrounger — he is our only rival.’[7] Here Prynne seems to pause, sizing up this chance-met stranger, his ancient counterpart, and questioning our modern values — as poets is one tempting interpretation — in comparison with older, more primitive instincts. From the same early collection, Prynne’s ‘Song in Sight of the World’ laments an England trapped under the thumb of classical influence, referencing the famous OE poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (where the well-mannered English theyns, under Byrhtnoth in the year 991, are thoroughly trounced by the less civilised Viking invaders):
We are a land
hammered by restraint, into
a too cycladic past. It is
the battle of Maldon binds
our feet;
Another Prynne poem, ‘For This, For That’, appears to be written partially in transitional Middle English itself. Interestingly, echoes of Anglo-Saxon and medieval ‘sampling’ also feature in Edwin Morgan’s work, as Chris Jones notes in his book Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth Century Poetry: ‘Unpublished drafts of abandoned poems show that Morgan was also starting to introduce OE fragments into the linguistic surface of his own compositions.’[8] From these examples, it seems the poet as linguistic magpie may be at his or her strongest when inspired by these early poems and their intriguing language and imagery.
More recently, Gordon Wardman’s Caedmon (Odyssey Poets, 2001) is a delicate and daring book-length sequence of poems written in the voice of the man commonly acknowledged to be our earliest-known English poet, the monk Caedmon. Unfortunately, little survives of Caedmon’s efforts; all we have is an eight line fragment, known popularly as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, backed up by an encomium from the Northumbrian Bede in his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Wardman’s Caedmon, drawing on this sketchy history, is correspondingly a series of short lyrics and fragments, written almost entirely in lower case, which imagine this seventh-century proto-poet’s life in a Whitby monastery and seek to capture the earliest stirrings of English poetry there — ‘the lilt and lingo of heroic lines’ — whilst admitting the impossibility of such a task, surrounded by ‘a mongrel rhetoric everywhere’.[9] Newcastle-born Wardman introduces his book with ‘the common shoddy of the tongue’ inviting the reader, perhaps, to see beyond the apparently uniform surface of modern English to the vibrant confusion of language and dialect beneath it, or as he puts it in the poem ‘Mess’:
a wild babu cacophony of gylpcwide
echoing in the meadhall.
Intriguingly, his poem ‘laureate’ puts forward a theory of why certain ages might lean toward particular poetries for reconstruction: ‘a hundred discordant voices — / in times of fragmentation/they dream themselves Alexander, Virgil’, but ‘Caedmon is their best shot at eternity’. Elsewhere, he writes rather less optimistically that ‘words’:
were the imagining of permanence,
runes tattooed on mortal flesh,
a higher message scribed on beast skin,
lines drummed into the common memory[10]
The sense of dislocation evident in Prynne and Wardman’s work — dislocation from self, from landscape, from society, even from Englishness itself — is mentioned by Jane Draycott in connection with her own interest in Old English, acknowledging the presence in her poems of ‘that whole Anglo-Saxon concept of the landscape/sea/coast as a condition of existence as much as the location for it, a protagonist in the drama itself, but also the powerful sense of dislocation and loss’.[11] Indeed, an early poem by Draycott, ‘The Night Tree’, directly references the content of Old English poems like ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’, where
men
report voices heard crying in darkness,
though for myself I think it is only the seals
calling to each other’
and a famous scene from the epic Beowulf itself, with ‘the ashes of great seafarers set up/as a beacon’. A recent poem by Jane Draycott, ‘Ashburnam House’, even deals with the rescue of a Beowulf manuscript from destruction by fire. Yet like Auden before her, and indeed Pound too, Draycott’s reasons for writing within the Anglo-Saxon tradition would seem to be aural as much as thematic. Explaining how her tutor at King’s College, London, used to record students reciting Anglo-Saxon verse, she finds now that ‘the formal and musical potential of the alliterative tradition seems sadly neglected — it's all too easy only to work principally with the harmonic effects of echo and rhyme/half-rhyme.’
This fascination with Old English poetry is not confined to the English, of course. As previously mentioned, we have Ezra Pound’s controversial version of ‘The Seafarer’ — many academics of the time considered his translation wildly inaccurate — and more recently Seamus Heaney published his award-winning verse translation of Beowulf. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that either poet’s interest in the Anglo-Saxon world was solely concerned with one poem. Pound’s work elsewhere reflects what Michael Alexander has described as Anglo-Saxon ‘linguistic tar’, particularly in the early Cantos,[12] and, although from Northern Ireland, Heaney is at pains to posit a deeply-felt relationship between the sounds and stresses of Old English verse and his own poetic roots: ‘Part of me ... had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.’[13] Chris Jones, indeed, finds Heaney’s North (1975) ‘a more impressively imaginative response to Old English poetry than his translation of Beowulf,’ not least as a collection which noticeably coins compound neologisms ‘modelled on Old English kennings’.[14] A ‘kenning’ is succinctly described by Chris Jones as a ‘metaphorically periphrastic compound word’; Anglo-Saxons found the direct approach — in their verse, at least — pedestrian and unimaginative. Typical examples of an OE kenning are ‘whale-road’ for sea and ‘earth-cave’ for grave. In Heaney’s work, language and landscape mesh together within this fragmentary mix of influences to form a poetic identity which is not necessarily an exact match for that poet’s cultural background, language itself ‘a kind of archaeological evidence for the story of those who used it and the land they lived on.’[15]
Are the qualities and themes of Anglo-Saxon poetry universal then, rather than specific to one culture and locality alone? In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound wrote:
I once got a man to start translating the Seafarer into Chinese. It came out almost directly into Chinese verse, with two solid ideograms in each half-line.[16]
Chris Jones sees this Poundian anecdote as particularly significant in flagging up the importance of ‘bare, linguistic essentials’ in OE verse.[17] But what are these bare essentials? As Nicholas Howe outlined above, they include a strictly observed pattern of alliteration, metrics based on one of a limited number of possible stress patterns, and the all-important mid-line caesura — which not only serves as a breathing space for the poet, but allows for musical repetition: an elaboration or variation on a theme, frequently involving the use of these ‘kennings’ or compound words. Gerard Manley Hopkins famously admired this interplay of alliteration and stress in OE verse; his own self-devised ‘Sprung Rhythm’ is poetry as structured stress, combining the driving rhythms of an epic like Beowulf and the linguistic playfulness of an Anglo-Saxon Riddle poem. More recent poets influenced by Hopkins have transferred those qualities to their own work in turn, the easily recognisable sound of OE verse passing indirectly through generations of poets. Citing Hopkins as a particular influence, Jane Draycott pinpoints such early encounters as vital to her poetic development later:
I must have incorporated in some kind of aural/physical memory the muscular energy of the alliterative mode, and the way it seems, when one is writing, to spring from the ear and tongue simultaneously.[18]
The themes of Anglo-Saxon poetry translate even more readily than its techniques into a contemporary idiom: courage, loyalty, obedience and the pursuit of glory on the one hand, with isolation, depression, exile, war and death on the other. It’s not hard to see how any of these could appeal to a modern poet in search of a theme. So we have a complex, political poet like Geoffrey Hill finding ample scope in the Anglo-Saxon ethos both for a dry, satirical savagery and the more tender tropes of the elegiac or love poem. His Mercian Hymns, written through both his own contemporary voice and that of the Mercian Offa, are ‘versets’ or prose poems that resonate with this curious combination of past and present, holding the medieval Offa up as ‘The starting-cry of a race. A name to conjure with’, with startlingly powerful results. Probably no other English-speaking poet has brought these two cultures into such close proximity before:
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone:
overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart
and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer her-
mitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge
and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new
estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for
oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’[19]
Hill’s influence can also be seen in more recent work, such as the newly published Lady Godiva and Me (Nine Arches Press, 2008) by Liam Guilar, a Coventry-born poet and teacher now living on the Labrador coast of Australia. Guilar’s educational background is in medieval literature, and his knowledge of Old and Middle English emerges in these short poems, their odd and often jarring amalgam of ancient and modern portraying a modern-day Coventry which seeks — not always successfully — to reconcile itself with its medieval past. Old English words are skilfully interwoven with modern English, while medieval characters such as Peeping Tom, Leofric and Godgifu provide a daring counterbalance to Guilar’s own reminiscences of his Coventry childhood. Yet even here there is a sense of dislocation and fragmentation, of a past which is slipping irrevocably away even from the linguists and historians and can now only be rebuilt and reinvented, word by tentative word, in these works of the imagination.
But is all this diligent rebuilding and reinvention of long-dead languages, heroes and cultures strictly necessary, even for poets with an enthusiasm for linguistics? Perhaps it’s time for us to stop exploring and glorifying our past literatures and concentrate instead on constructing a poetry based on the admiration of more recent poets and near contemporaries. In one early poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’, the Scottish poet Don Paterson imagines the unfortunate outcome of poets endlessly, compulsively retelling epics:
Now,
in the ur-bark your voice has become,
reputations
deflate, heroes dwindle ...’[20]
If we look to Anglo-Saxon remnants for some kind of primitive tribal identity, we will be disappointed, for whatever is reflected back appears to be, rather mundanely, ourselves. Yet we may find inspiration there, and possibly some comfort too: self-aware, heroic epics like Beowulf may earn a place in a war-torn twenty-first century, but so too should the Anglo-Saxon elegies — elegies for the lost, the fallen, the innumerable dead — and their enduring love poems, steeped in the numinous. Embracing the themes and alliterative force of Anglo-Saxon poetry need not entail a dissolution into the ‘ur-bark’ of Paterson’s cautionary tale; instead, it has the potential to empower us in creative terms, bringing contemporary poetry into contact with its own dynamic past and reconnecting it with those fragments of Old English still very much alive at the core of the language. An awareness of this vital linguistic potential lurking beneath the ancient scripts of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts may be what inspired Ted Hughes to write the following, with almost preternatural insight, in his poem ‘Crowego’:
Drinking Beowulf’s blood, and wrapped in his hide,
Crow communes with poltergeists out of old ponds.
His wings are the stiff back of his only book,
Himself the only page — of solid ink.
So he gazes into the quag of the past
Like a gypsy into the crystal of the future,
Like a leopard into a fat land.[21]
With special thanks to Chris Jones and all those who attended the Bone Dreams: Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination conference in Oxford, April 2008.
© 2008
Salt Publishing Limited 
