Against 'dustsceawung'

The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and the unhappy modern

It has become increasingly fashionable among the young to mourn the loss of the old – particularly a past none of us now living ever knew.

Overall, I think this is good. We are recovering an appreciation for tradition rather than reckless pursuit of innovation. We are remembering the savor of humility rather than the relentless confidence in progress. And much – too much – has been forgotten, maybe irrecoverably. It is heartening to see this long overdue turn.

But lamenting too long the thing lost can become an exercise in melancholy for its own sake.

Looking at ruins has a word in Old English: dustsceawung, meaning roughly “the contemplation of dust”. Google it, and you’ll find that over the past several years the word has enjoyed something of a renaissance.

Less talked about is its actual use in context. ‘Dustsceawung’ does not appear in any Old English poems - perhaps disappointingly, it cannot be found in The Wanderer or The Ruin. It exists, as far as I can tell, only in a single Old English homily, Blickling Homily X, where we are told the story of a man who, out of unbearable sadness, visited the tomb of his rich friend. The bones and dust speak, advising the mourner to depart:

Then the bones of the dead man called to him, and thus said, ‘Why hast thou come hither to see us? Now mayest thou see here a portion of dust, and the relict of worms, where thou previously didst see a purple garment interwoven with gold. Behold now dust and dry bones, where thou before didst see limbs, after flesh’s kind, fair to look upon. O my friend and kinsman, be mindful of this, and convince thyself that thou art now what I was formerly, and after a time thou shalt be what I now am. Remember this, and know that my riches that I had of yore are all vanished and come to nought, and my dwellings are decayed and perished. But turn thee to thyself and incline thy heart to counsel, and merit that thy prayers be acceptable to God Almighty.’ He then, so sad and sorrowful, departed from the 'dust-spectacle’ [dustsceawung] (contemplation of the dust), and turned himself away from all the affairs of this world; and he began to learn and to teach the praise of God, and to love spiritual virtues, and thereby earned for himself the grace of the Holy Spirit; and he delivered also the other’s soul from punishment and released him from torments.¹

Far from being a charming description for a suitably contemplative, introspective action, dustsceawung is presented as an act of futility - unless it serves as the impetus for action.

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One of the best-known Old English poems – a poem which deals with precisely the questions of longing, of displacement, of exile in a strange world – is The Wanderer. And in recent years, it seems (based on anecdotal observations) to have become more appreciated. For the unhappy modern, The Wanderer seems to describe our present situation.

There is something attractive in the figure portrayed here – the wise loner, unfortunate (perhaps through no fault of his own?), traveling restlessly. It is the figure of the ronin, the exile, the adventurer-hero. Old English had a term for it: wræcca, a word that could mean both what it came to mean in modern English – a wretch, a miserable sufferer, perhaps with questionable motives – and what it came to mean in modern German – a Recke, a heroic adventurer, a knight errant or a figure like Sigurd in the old legendary tradition.

But The Wanderer does not provide the only picture of Anglo-Saxon exile, although it is the one we may most long for, blended as it is with worldly honor, with memories and hopes of praiseworthy action and status.

Another vision is provided by The Seafarer, a poem which Ezra Pound famously cut down to size (choosing simply not to translate the final fifth of it).

Pound’s version keeps the solitude, the longing, the mental and physical strain of the seafarer that we encounter in the early bulk of the poem. The focus is personal. At a quick count, in the first 70 or so lines of the original Old English we meet with some 16 forms of first-person singular: words for “I”, “me”, “myself”. In Pound’s version, the tally runs to 25.

Pound chooses to end his Seafarer with these lines (roughly corresponding to ll. 89-99 in the original):

Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

No man at all going the earth’s gait,

But age fares against him, his face paleth,

Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven,

Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,

Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

And though he strew the grave with gold,

His born brothers, their buried bodies

Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

²

It is a grim and sobering final image. What follows this in the Old English poem? Nothing important (we might say tongue in cheek, paraphrasing movie Sam when Gandalf catches him eavesdropping) – that is, a good deal about the soul, and a terrifying Lord, and something about the end of the world.

For the Seafarer does not end with the gold in the grave (though it pauses here a little longer than Pound did – long enough to make the point that this gold will not save a sinful soul). This poem begins in the sea, in suffering: it ends in the heavens:

Micel biþ se meotudes egsa,   forþon hi seo molde oncyrreð;

se gestaþelade   stiþe grundas,

eorþan sceatas   ond uprodor.

Dol biþ se þe him his dryhten ne ondrædeþ;   cymeð him se deað unþinged.

Eadig biþ se þe eaþmod leofaþ;   cymeð him seo ar of heofonum,

meotod him þæt mod gestaþelað,   forþon he in his meahte gelyfeð.

Stieran mon sceal strongum mode,   ond þæt on staþelum healdan,

ond gewis werum,   wisum clæne,

scyle monna gehwylc   mid gemete healdan

wiþ leofne ond wið laþne . . . bealo

þeah þe he hine willefyres fulne . . .

oþþe on bæle   forbærnedne

his geworhtne wine.   Wyrd biþ swiþre,

meotud meahtigra   þonne ænges monnes gehygd.

Uton we hycgan   hwær we ham agen,

ond þonne geþencan   hu we þider cumen,

ond we þonne eac tilien,   þæt we to moten

in þa ecan   eadignesse,

þær is lif gelong   in lufan dryhtnes,

hyht in heofonum.   Þæs sy þam halgan þonc,

þæt he usic geweorþade,   wuldres ealdor,

ece dryhten,   in ealle tid. 
                                             Amen.

-ll. 103-104³

So whelming is the One Lord’s terror   the world itself turns away;

fixed He fast   the earth’s foundations

set its surface   framed the heavens.

He lacks who his own lord undreadeth;   comes to him a death unlooked for.

Bless’d is he by pride unburdened;   comes to him the bliss of Heaven -

the Measurer that mind established,   His might to see and to believe.

A man must straiten, strengthen mind-thoughts,   strain to grip what God established,

honor oathwords,   aye in cleanness,

to hold in measure   is each man’s duty:

love for love   and hate for hate,

though his friend   should fall foe-stricken

or in balefire   flames consume him,

dearest friend -   what’s done is done.

God is greater   than grief, than thought.

Think we now on   where our home is

consider then   how we may come there

praiseworthy,   to be permitted

into that   eternal blessing

where life is long   in love of God,

bliss in Heaven.   Thank Him, Holy

Who so loves us,   Lord of Glory,

Lord eternal,   past time’s long count. 

Amen.⁴

The poem which begins in the confused realm of sense impressions (the cold; the looming waves; the sudden appearance of a great cliff; the cries of birds; memories of laughter; joys and sorrows) – ends in a realm of ideas. The setting, the ground (the solid horizon) falls away; the sea, too, passes. The spiritual realm irrupts into the physical. Almost exactly half of the Seafarer concerns the sea; the other half, God and man’s fate. The sea, after its last mention in line 64, does not rise up again into the poem; there is no neat, symmetrical return to the concrete imagery of suffering.

And at almost exactly the point where the sea drops off, we also lose the “I”, the speaker. The self and the world fall away together (a motion that is perhaps reflected, also, in the lavish, ‘hypermetrical’ lines of ll. 106-9, which burst the bounds of standard four-beat Old English meter). All we are left with is fear of the Lord. Just as, at l. 103, the world turns away from God’s power, so here the poet, contemplating God and Heaven, turns away from the world – specifically, from the individual’s experience of the world.

What replaces the specific images, the recounting of personal suffering, is the traditional saying, the gnome, the cliché.

Pound, I think, loved The Seafarer not for what sounded to him – and, perhaps, to us – a flat, conventional piety and positivity, but for that description of suffering, of weariness, of cold and solitude. A hundred odd years later, we are still in the same modernist sea. It takes effort to love that abstract and ‘conventional’ ending that Pound saw as extraneous or detrimental to the earlier concrete depiction of human experience.

The effort is worth it, though. The Seafarer’s ending is vigorous, triumphant, and in flight. It goes beyond the crabbed self. This is its exact point – and the reason the early 20^th-century modernist jettisoned it is perhaps the reason it is easier for the early 21^st-century reader to see its virtues: the seafarer traces a path past the alienation and atomization that characterize our situation today.

The self, the concrete, individuated experience – this is precisely what is lost, what yields before the abstract, the general, the principle.

At the beginning of Lent, as we are marked with ashes, the priest tells us:

remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It is a necessary, a salutary reminder.

But the ashes are not the point, nor is dust the final destination.

The Wanderer’s exile resonates - and rightly so. But our path leads past exile. It leads home.

1. Translation of all the Blickling Homilies by Richard Morris can be found here.

2. Ezra Pound, The Seafarer, from Poetry Foundation.

3. Old English text from Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. III, The Exeter Book.

4. Translation mine.