The Complete Old English Poems
Page 22
Crashed and collapsed, splattered with blood.
The sea screamed like a carrion bird,
The ocean was full of wounds and weapons,
The stink of corpses rose in the air.
A few tried to flee, fearing their doom, 475
Backtracking at the edge of the waves.
Havoc made a home in their breaking hearts—
Chaos and catastrophe menaced their spirits.
The spineless warriors wished to go home—
The great boasters had become deserters, 480
Cowards with nothing to crow about.
The raging storm-wrath was a dark demon—
Doomsday came early for those Egyptians,
As the Lord cut them off from sea to shore
With a stroke of water. He removed the road 485
He had made for the Israelites. No one there
Could walk home through the ocean’s outrage.
Their only escape was a road to oblivion.
The waves rose up along with the wailing—
Darkness and despair hovered in the air. 490
Bodies were wasted in the wilderness of waves.
The Lord’s flood filled with Egyptian blood.
The wall of waves came crashing down,
Lashing sea and sky with death and destruction.
Terror seized the troops, proud kings perished— 495
The dying cries were silenced by water.
Their fate was fixed—choices floated away.
Shields could be seen, unarmed and gleaming.
Warriors felt like fish in a net of death.
The sand had waited for the surging waves, 500
When the icy sea, separated from itself,
Would seal up and seek its seabed again,
Dragging the Egyptian army endlessly down
Like a grim spirit smiting its enemies.
The sky-blue air was blended with blood. 505
The waves had menaced the exiles’ march,
The seafarers’ journey, with death and destruction—
Until the Lord lashed out through the hand of Moses,
And the flood swept down, surging, seething,
Raging, ravaging, clutching at corpses. 510
The air grew angry—water assailed the land.
The wave-ramparts crumbled, the sea-walls crashed,
When almighty God, the Guardian of creation,
Lifted his holy hand against the Egyptians,
Keeping his covenant with the exiled Israelites, 515
Protecting his people as he had always promised,
Sending the lethal sea-gates down.
The arrogant Egyptians could not hinder his hand
Or escape his doom, the sea’s fierce fury—
He destroyed them all in shrieking horror. 520
The seas slid up, the bodies slid down;
Dread fears rose, death-dreams plunged;
Fresh wounds wept, bloody tears tumbled
Into the ocean’s embrace. The Lord of the flood
Ravaged the ramparts with an ancient sword 525
Of storm-wind and wave-walls. Troops perished.
Hordes of the sinful headed toward the bottom,
Where they lost their souls in endless sleep.
The evil enemy, white with fear,
Kissed the dark waters and clutched at nothing 530
Except themselves. Together they traveled
Into unbreathing terror, unearthly burial.
Pharaoh found as he dropped down
Into the abyss that the Lord of waves
Was mightier than any Egyptian power. 535
With righteous wrath, God meant to crush
Pharaoh’s pride in the awful embrace
Of wind and wave. The Lord’s reward
To every Egyptian for that day’s work
Was doom in the deep, an unfathomed fate. 540
No one could come home to bleakly tell
A survivor’s story to the waiting wives—
How the sea swallowed up both troops
And tale-tellers, bards and bold warriors.
Each hearth had a hoard-guardian gone; 545
Each wife, a husband in the sea’s embrace.
The ultimate Power drained the cup
Of Egyptian boasts down to the dregs.
They were left empty in their battle with God.
Then noble Moses, a man of great virtue, 550
Spoke wise words of enduring wisdom
To the Israelites on the Red Sea shore.
His counsel and vision transcended time.
Even now nations know of that day’s work,
Discovering in scripture the Lord’s laws 555
Ordained for the exiles during their journey,
If the body’s guardian, the human mind,
Ruler of the bone-house, our own intellect,
Can unlock the mysteries of holy scripture
With the keys of the spirit. Then God’s treasure 560
Of wise words and careful counsel
Will come forth, and the faithful will find
Fellowship with the Lord and the Maker’s mercy.
He will grant us more, as the scholars tell us—
The richer joys of a reward in heaven. 565
It’s true that our present worldly pleasures
Are transient. Time unravels them all.
Desire and delight fade, touched and twisted
By inevitable sorrow—an exile’s inheritance.
We wander the world pursued by woe, 570
Our homeless hearts mired in misery.
We dread the dungeon, the endless pit
Of unredeemed hell where demons rule,
Fire scorches and scourges, serpents strike
Tormented souls with their venomous tongues. 575
On earth we are plagued by relentless terrors,
The timeless thieves of old age and early death.
We struggle in life with sin and senility.
The day of reckoning, the hour of doom,
Draws near, a moment of might and glory, 580
When all our deeds will be judged by God,
And he will lead the steadfast, righteous souls
From their exile on earth to a homeland in heaven,
The light and life of the Lord’s blessing,
Where everyone in that company of joy 585
Will sing hymns, glorious hosannas,
To the King of hosts for all eternity.
Moses rose to speak, the mildest of men,
The wisest of counselors. His people awaited
His precious words in awed silence, 590
Perceiving the miracle of the Lord’s might,
The power of the prophet, and the sense of salvation
In the wise wonder of his healing words.
So Moses spoke to the chosen people:
“Mighty is this multitude, powerful its leader, 595
The Lord of heaven, our shield and support,
Who guides our journey. He has given us the hand
Of governance over the land and people of Canaan,
Their cities and treasures, their spacious kingdom.
The Lord of angels will fulfill his promise, 600
Carry out his covenant from your fathers’ days,
That if you respect his laws, revere his learning,
His holy precepts, henceforth you will subdue
All your enemies and occupy this kingdom
Between the two seas and rule the high halls 605
Of feasting and fellowship from this day forward.
Your might will be unmatched, your glory great.”
At these wise words the host rejoiced,
The troops were jubilant. The trumpets of victory
Sang a beautiful song of bright victory, 610
And the banners were raised. All of the Israelites
Were home free on
the shore. The heavenly pillar,
The beam of glory, had guided them forward
Under God’s gaze, protecting the host.
The warriors exulted, the people were ecstatic— 615
They’d escaped alive from their enemies’ power,
Risking their lives under the sea’s ramparts
Raised from the deep. When the wave-walls went up,
The waters ran blood as they walked through the sea
With their war-gear on. After barely escaping 620
The Egyptian army, the men raised a battle-song,
Praising their protector in a loud voice.
The women answered back with their own songs,
Lifting up a host of hymns to the Lord,
Celebrating the glory of his mighty miracle. 625
Then it was easy to find the African woman,
The Ethiopian beauty, adorned with gold,
The wife of Moses, standing on the shore.
Then the sea-remnant began to share out
The treasure of arm-bands and neck-rings, 630
The Egyptian booty, washed up on the shore,
A people’s plunder, the gift of the waves.
Their bondage was broken, their reward revealed.
They divided up the treasures, gold and silver,
Robes and rings, swords and shields, 635
Clothes and corselets, in turn by tribe.
This was the wealth that Joseph had amassed
That the Egyptians took. Those treasure-keepers,
From king to soldier, pharaoh to follower,
Now slept in the sea, an untold host. 640
DANIEL
This poem is based on the biblical book of Daniel, chapters 1–5, and may also owe debts to Jerome’s In Danielem and Aldhelm’s De Virginitate (Lerer, 128–29). There are a substantial number of parallel lines in this poem and a portion of Azarias: The Suffering and Songs of the Three Youths in the Exeter Book. The correlation is greatest between lines 286–370 of the translation here and lines 1–80 of the Azarias translation, and it shows what Remley calls a “progressive divergence” (2002, 87). The relation between the two poems is much debated. In his edition Farrell argues that the two poems may show the influence of a common tradition or that Daniel may have been the source of Azarias (40 ff.).
Daniel has sometimes been considered a flawed poem because of a number of problems: (1) The first dream is not described in detail, as it is in the Bible (see below); (2) the salvation of the three youths from the flaming furnace is told twice; (3) the song of supplication by Azarias (Azariah) to God appears to be recounted after the youths’ deliverance; and (4) the poem ends abruptly in the middle of Daniel’s explication of the angelic writing on the wall (for more on the problems, see Greenfield and Calder, 216 ff.; Farrell, 29 ff.). These “problems,” however, may derive from the poet’s overall sense of purpose, which differs from that of his sources. Solo notes that certain punctuation changes and a reading of þa as “when” instead of “then” indicate that the poet is repeating passages for a poetic purpose (347 ff.). He argues that the twice-told passage of the three youths tormented in the furnace serves, much like the twice-told tale in Beowulf of the hero’s battle with Grendel, to present the action from different perspectives in order to “contrast the viewpoints, the visions of carnal and spiritual men” (363–64). Portnoy points out that “the image of the dew in Daniel is in fact a central and well-integrated component of an elaborate ring structure,” noting that this narrative device, which the poem has in common with Exodus, “goes some way towards challenging the prevailing criticism of the poem’s organization and pace” (195). Farrell argues that the poet concentrates less on the prophetic dreams than on the “narrative portions, especially those dealing with Daniel and the Three Children in their struggles against Nabuchodonosor and his line” (30), noting that the second dream is represented in detail “because it is of immediate importance as part of the struggle between Nabuchodonosor and Daniel” (31). He also points out that the opening and closing of the story are shaped to emphasize a balance between the fall of the Jews and the fall of the Babylonians (31). Citing Caie (1978), Greenfield argues that the main theme of the poem is not so much dream-reading as “a warning against pride in times of prosperity” (Greenfield and Calder, 218) and that the structural problem posed by the song “is obviated if one sees it … as communal rather than personal, a prayer for the salvation of the Jews as a nation” (217).
The details of the first dream as recounted in the Bible are not revealed in the poem, but they might well have been known by medieval readers. In the biblical account of the king’s dream (Daniel 2:31 ff.), a figure or idol appears with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of brass, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. The figure is destroyed by a succession of blows from a powerful stone applied layer by layer from the weak feet upward toward the strong head. The head of gold is likened to the king, and the other parts to the succeeding kingdoms which will all eventually be destroyed. The construction of the golden idol in the poem results from the king’s pride; in the Bible it may also result from the king’s unconscious desire to remake the dream so that the entire body of the dream-figure is made from the more resilient gold. In this sense the king denies the meaning of the dream and defies God’s warning.
Lerer argues that a central issue in the poem is the relationship between oral and written articulation and transmission of sacred traditions, saying:
Human language as practiced by the Babylonians reveals itself to be replete with instabilities. It offers narratives of unsure dreams, and in the exercise of power, gives voice only to lies, boasts, and misapprehensions. The word of God, however, comes not spoken but written. As a people of the book, the Israelites possess a literacy that grants them access to spiritual truth. The images of understanding that the narrator shapes through Daniel coalesce, at its conclusion, into a statement of linguistic as well as moral life. (144)
Thus the word of God, though open to divinely inspired interpretation by the likes of Daniel, is scripted and cannot be changed, as Daniel clearly tells the king.
After line 172a there is a loss of a sheet between two folios which may have contained materials from the biblical Daniel 3:2–6 (Farrell, 3, 57). I have supplied some brief lines of transition in the translation.
Daniel
I have heard that the Hebrews lived in Jerusalem,
Blessed with power, dwelling in prosperity,
Sharing out wealth from their great gold-hoard.
They ruled the realm as was only right
Since God gave a mighty army to Moses, 5
Who led the hosts out of Egypt with a miracle.
They were a daring and proud-spirited people.
As long as they governed the land and cities
With skill, their power and prosperity were great.
As long as they kept their father’s covenant, 10
The ancient pact between God and Abraham,
The Guardian of heaven, greatest of rulers,
Remained their protector, their shield and sustainer.
The Lord of creation offered the company
Strength and courage so that their soldiers 15
Could boldly advance under bright helmets
To vanquish enemy armies opposed to him,
Scourging the faithless—until in their feasts,
Pride and passion, drunkenness and deceit,
Wormed their devilish way into their hearts, 20
Undermining their faith, cracking their covenant.
They left their learning, relinquished the law,
Ignoring the might and measure of the Lord.
A man should never separate his soul
From God’s love or set it on some lesser good. 25
Then I saw that the proud people of Israel
Were straying into sin, committing crimes.
Those unrighteous acts were an affli
ction to God.
Often the Keeper of the heavenly kingdom
Sent to Israel holy souls, inspired prophets, 30
To counsel and command, teach and foretell,
Offering the gift of wisdom in their words.
For a time people believed in their teaching,
Till their earthly desires dragged them down,
And they traded in truth for devious delight 35
And the Lord’s wisdom for the devil’s deceit.
Then the Lord grew fierce and grim-hearted
To those whom he had given wealth and power.
Those once favored had left the faith;
Those once dearest to the Lord were lost. 40
He had revealed to them the road of attack,
Brought these strangers to the place of Salem,
Where the fine, fortified city stood,
Securely protected by strong walls.
Then a savage army of Chaldean sorcerers, 45
Mighty magicians, approached the city,
Bent on slaughter, hungry for blood.
Nebuchadnezzar, the bold Prince of Babylon,
Had hatched a plot with a deadly purpose
In his bent, brooding, and malicious mind. 50
That savage leader sorely wanted
To expel, enslave, or kill the inhabitants
Of Israel by an endless onslaught of troops.
From the south and north he assembled his men,
Fierce soldiers, the grimmest of guests. 55
The cruel conquerors marched westward
With their heathen kings. All of the homeland
Guardians of Israel enjoyed life and love
Only as long as the Lord allowed.
I’ve heard it said that the menacing nation 60
Of ancient enemies, Israel’s fierce foes,
Ransacked the city. Those evil unbelievers
Trashed the holy temple of Solomon,
Plundered its treasures of silver and gold,
Pilfered great riches from the glorious ruins, 65
Destroyed or delivered up every city-stronghold,
The people’s sanctuaries, their battle shelters.
They brought home a booty of gold and men,
The treasure-keepers’ joy and their kith and kin.
They bore the people of Israel off to Babylon 70
Over eastern roads and enslaved them all,
A heathen’s hoard. Nebuchadnezzar knew
No charity. He subjugated the survivors,
The children of Israel who were sold as slaves,
And sent his counselors and soldiers west 75