According to Edward Hirsh, “English poetry began with a vision.” He’s referring to “Caedmon’s Hymn,” probably the earliest surviving verse in Old English. It’s embedded in a story that Bede wrote around the year 730 CE. Seamus Heaney calls this story “the myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry.”
Bede tells of an exemplary monk of Whitby Abbey during the time when St. Hilda was its abbess. This monk’s poetry turned many toward God. Bede explains that Caedmon never learned from human beings to make poetry. In fact, during banquets, when “it was decreed that all should sing,” and the harp was about to be passed to him to take his turn, he would rise from the middle of the company and go to his own house.
One night, he fled the singing and went to the village stables to tend the cattle he was responsible for. He completed his chores, fell asleep, and dreamt of a figure who said, “Caedmon, sing me something.” He replied that he couldn’t sing; that’s why he had come home from the banquet. The dream-figure insisted that he sing about the “beginning of creatures.” Caedmon found himself singing a poem that he had never heard before in praise of the Creator.
Bede includes this poem in Latin, acknowledging that it loses its “beauty and dignity” in translation. However, thanks to medieval scribes who added the original to the margins of many Bede manuscripts, we have the Old English text.
When Caedmon awoke, he remembered the words, added “many more,” and sang them to the local reeve (a magistrate), who took him to see St. Hilda. She and the learned men of her abbey were impressed and began explaining various biblical narratives to Caedmon. He became a monk and turned Bible stories into the “best songs,” instructing and inspiring people to shun lives of crime and to love truth and good deeds.
Caedmon’s poem, ostensibly the oldest in English, is also an invitation to think about the origins and purposes of poetry in general and its connection to other kinds of work, other kinds of knowledge, and other creatures. Several modern poets have responded to these questions.
Denise Levertov writes as Caedmon, beginning:
All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
She imagines that Caedmon takes his inspiration from the physical beauty of the stable where he is most at home:
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure.
Jean Beal focuses on Caedmon’s fear when the harp comes his way. She writes alliterative verse that hints at the Old English form, beginning: “Hearing the harp, like hearing my enemy’s horn ….”
Some critics have seen W.H. Auden’s “Anthem” as an echo of Caedmon’s song.
Seamus Heaney entitles his Caedmon poem “Whitby-sur-Moyola.” This place sounds like an English village, but the Moyola is a river in Ulster near where Heaney grew up. I think Caedmon reminds Heaney of his ancestors. In “Digging,” he writes of his father, “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” Working the soil becomes Heaney’s model for poetry: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”
In “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” Heaney adopts the perspective of someone who can recall Brother Caedmon, now deceased. This narrator admires Caedmon as an agricultural laborer: “the perfect yardman, / Unabsorbed in what he had to do / But doing it perfectly, and watching you.” Caedmon had finished learning poetry: “He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails.” Although the monk had mastered this learned art, his inspiration always came from the stable:
His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.
Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.
I’ll take a turn:
Caedmon
How do you tell people where it comes from,
This stuff you produce professionally,
These words that the young are told they must heed?
You know that somehow it started with work,
With loneliness, with silence and with fear.
First, you stood at a slight angle to life.
When it was your turn, you could only be
Like the warm silent beasts with steaming breath.
Then you found your voice, and the credit came.
They even began to give you the first turn.
Since you can't explain it, you make up a tale:
A dream in a stable when words just flowed.
It’s no less true than other things you say.
See also: Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013; “Glendalough“; “The Scholar and his Dog“; “Midlife“; and The Cliff-Top Monastery by A.B. Jackson.