By Meg Harris
Sometimes I am brushing my teeth in the morning, remembering that my housemate will return later today, when I realise that I have not opened my mouth to speak in three whole days.
I live on a street full of houses, next to a street full of traffic. I hear the dog walkers, the school rush, the social joggers, the cyclists, and I am often struck that I don't know any of these people. My own people live far away – in Murray Bridge, or Clare, or Port Macdonnell – and I have no car, no way to reach them, only a phone that hardly ever rings, and nothing to say to them anyway. Worse, for months I haven’t even been able to attend lectures, or go to the supermarket, or the café, to pay for someone with a familiar face to ask me how I am and listen to my reply: "Fine, thanks, how are you?"
But recently, into this unemployed "iso-life" came an ancient poem about exile, written more than a thousand years ago, in an English I cannot understand.
The Wanderer begins: “Oft him anhaga are gebidedh.” The lone soul endures.
These opening words, in the context of the poem, carry strong implications of the presence of God. Gebidedh: to abide (with God), (to be granted the grace) to endure. Our very existence, and continuance of existence, is Providence – amplified in silence, made tangibly present by isolation.
The Wanderer continues: “Metudes miltse / theah the he mod-cearig / geond lagu-lade / longe sceolde.” In Your myriad mercies, the mind-weary soul suffers along the water-way. Our suffering is grace. “Hreran mid hondum / hrim-calde sae.” Hand-paddling the rime-cold sea.
Gratitude has been a big word for me, lately, particularly during the early pandemic panic. In The Wanderer, an Anglo-Saxon exile is courting frostbite, and here I am reading about it from the comfort of my own home. A mother of three can't buy toilet paper while my small household has enough. Other people are dying. But gratitude does not exist in denial of suffering; rather, it consists in the acknowledgement of the graces received in any circumstance: I had enough… I was able to stay at home… I had copious entertainment…. I was lonely.
When I first encountered The Wanderer I had never heard of COVID-19, but the poem resonated with me because it spoke about being disconnected from society, which I think we all experience in one way or another. We all have at least a part of ourselves that lives in exile.
The titular Wanderer was once a king's retainer, fighting and feasting in fellowship with the highest ranking members of his community. He used to be comfortable, proud, and to take things for granted. But now he has been brought low. His friends are gone, his king is dead, his civilisation overthrown in battle. Now, he wanders the open sea, alone, and contemplates the rise and fall of all human strivings, the humility of being, the mercy of God. He asserts that this is wisdom and entreats the young to listen.
I am young, and I have not suffered as the Wanderer has, but his story resonates with me as a story about leaving home, about fending for oneself, and about finding that the social context which was once your whole world is not as stable or eternal as you thought it was.
In homage to The Wanderer, I have tried my hand at Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse and four-stress split lines. For example: Hreran mid hondum hrim-calde sae
Notice how the line has a caesura (or pause) in the middle, with two stressed syllables either side of the pause. Also, that the first and third stressed syllables (but never the fourth) must alliterate. This was a very interesting form to follow, and quite a departure from the iambic feet and set rhyme schemes I am used to challenging myself with. However, once I got into it, I found even my informal writing littered with alliterations in exactly this pattern. It is a form which is, as far as we know or can define, native to English, and it is a delight.
I find there is an inherent irony in my being able to connect with an ancient exile, in writing a poem about silence, in finding a modern sense of disjunction in an ancient poetic form, in having to translate English into English.
We are all souls adrift, even in our own language, our own society, even our own selves. Poems, all art forms, serve as anchors: “I am here,” they say. “Where are you?”
The Silent
Gardens of grace
grow through history:
from paradise
to paradise,
through the thorough
threshold of
the agony in
gethsemane.
The days of men
die like flowers;
wind-winnowed
wheat is left.
The sunlight sifts
silent here,
ornamenting
the over-canopy,
among the many
mellifluous songbirds
it lights on a lithe
limb bending
deftly downward,
down to me,
sitting still
and silent, listening.
Voices vaporous
vent through fences,
pedestrian dolours
double back.
Hushed and hidden,
here I listen,
tongue-tied,
troubled mute.
Closed mouth
clamped shut,
unopened,
unused;
weeks, weeks,
while by,
unspoken,
unsaid.
Speech sequestered
in silent thought.
The street is strewn
with strangers’ talk,
down the dog-path
disappearing;
phantom faceless
friends, unknown.
Listless,
lone watcher:
Eloi, Eloi,
alas! This
isolation
is not good
for man,
for me.
Where are the warbling
women gone?
The choir, quaint
and quasi-musical?
Let us loudly
laud our saviour!
Praise our precious
prince of grace!
My tongue, untethered,
turned to heaven’s
song, sung,
celebrated
in churches’ chants
and charming hymns.
Together, gathered:
God and us.
Now, not
a noise breaks.
Silent stands
the street a while
Barely breathing
being is.
The world waits
wondering that
existence
exists.
A blackbird
babbles lightly.
A pigeon purrs,
then pecks a little
—startled, stirs,
a striking flurry.
All life
lashes the air.
Separated songbirds
sing yet.
God’s garden
grows here:
heart unhidden
He knows.
Soon will songs
sound again;
Soon and very
soon return.
Meg Harris graduated from Tabor with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 2018. Her interest in Old English and foreign languages began when she read The Hobbit, as a child, and learned Tolkien's Dwarvish runes. She writes poetry and short stories and was twice co-editor of the Tales from the Upper Room creative writing anthology.
You can read The Wanderer on page 286 of the Codex exoniensis hosted on archive.org as of 27/May/2020. https://archive.org/details/codexexoniensisc00sociuoft/page/286/mode/1up