“The Wanderer”1
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.
Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger’s leap at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.W. H. Auden (1966: 51)
1.A preliminary reading
Even after reading the poem several times, first silently and
then preferably aloud so as not to miss the booming alliterative stress
patterns (particularly in the very first line), most first-time readers, if
not all, are likely to conclude that the text is rather cryptic or even
opaque.
Besides, the persona, the ‘speaker’ in the poem, is not
interactively very co-operative either. He remains consistently aloof by
assuming multifarious identities some of which are quite puzzling, such as
what man (2), he (5),
him (6), that man (7), a
stranger to strangers (9), chat (a chat is a
small songbird with a harsh call; its name is probably imitative of its
call), (11), a bird stone-haunting (13), an unquiet
bird (13), head (14), him
(19), him (21) culminating, so to speak, in The
Wanderer, the poem’s title. Furthermore, the perhaps muddled
reader is bound to come across numerous linguistically prominent,
foregrounded textual features on all levels of language organization, some
of which are quite baffling.
Thus, on the level of phonology, we hear distinct alliterative
stress patterns (Nash 2006: 152–3;
Jones 2013: 262–3) which are
embodied in sequences like the following: Doom is dark and deeper
than any sea-dingle (1), (There head) falls forward,
fatigued at evening (14), Waving from window,
(spread of) welcome (16). On the lexical level we notice
mystifying and quizzical imagery, for example, deeper than any
sea-dingle (1), day-wishing flowers appearing
(3), through place-keepers (8) over undried
sea (9) and houses for fishes (10). Finally,
on the grammatical level, the reader is faced with what is perhaps the
poem’s most striking feature, namely its patchy syntax, which according to
Leech (1969),
impressionistically evokes a certain psychological state. Thus, according to
Leech, the poet evolves in the second stanza (lines 14–20) “a subjectless,
articleless style which suggests the exile’s loss of a sense of identity and
of a coordinated view of life”.
2.Discussion: Style and tone
So far we have been trying to read the poem as text; that is,
as a verbal record of the persona’s attempt to communicate his mysterious
predicament in a distressing style and in a tone that is deeply unhappy and
doleful. Though style is a more comprehensive category and therefore
subsumes tone, the two terms are notoriously difficult to define. Perhaps we
can define style as a speaker’s or writer’s, often characteristic, mode of
linguistic expression in terms of emotion, effectiveness, clarity, beauty
and the like. Tone, on the other hand, appears to be related to a particular
attitude or perspective conveyed by a writer’s style (Verdonk 2013: 25). In a recent exchange with the
present author, Henry Widdowson (personal communication) made the keen
observation that the speaker’s tone in the poem seems to be “the expression
of Auden’s personal sense of isolation”, which is reinforced by the barren
landscape surrounding the persona.
2.1Text, context, discourse
It is a commonplace assumption in modern stylistics that
the meaning of a text does not come into being until it is actually
related to an appropriate context. This process of contextualization of
the text is in essence the reader’s attempt at a reconstruction of the
speaker’s or writer’s intended message or discourse. Evidently, this is
an ongoing activity because the text by itself, without guidance from
the context, is to a large extent meaningless. Similarly, a
contextualized discourse without its textual guide would lose its
linguistic bearings and, in point of fact, not come into being at all
(Werth 1999: 149–50). In
sum, one might say that, in a way, discourse takes text and context
together because they may be seen as interacting generators of meaning
(Verdonk 2012: 11–23).
At this stage of our so far poor attempt at a sensible
reading of the poem as a coherent whole, we appear to have reached a
state of deadlock. This can only be resolved, I think, by enlarging the
poem’s context through the incorporation of relevant particulars from
Auden’s biography from around the time he was writing “The Wanderer”,
which, according to his biographer Edward Mendelson (1981: 44) was in 1928, when Auden
was 21. In that year his friend and fellow poet Stephen Spender
hand-printed and published Auden’s first collection of poetry in an
edition of about 45 copies, simply titled Poems. Auden,
who throughout his career resisted the idea that a poem could ever be
finished, continued to make alterations while the printing was still
going on. Most fascinatingly, the book contains several alterations made
by hand by Auden and Spender (see Poems 1928).
Auden refused to title his earliest collections of poetry
more specifically. Perhaps he wanted the reader to approach his poems
with an open mind. Anyway, he quite consistently used the same bare
title for a different book published by Faber & Faber in 1930, after
it had been accepted by T. S. Eliot.
A couple of years before Poems was
published, Auden had changed his studies at Oxford University from
biology into English Language in the summer of 1926. He quickly
developed a passionate enthusiasm for Old English and Middle English, a
part of the English syllabus that was often unpopular with
undergraduates at Oxford. Thus, a fellow undergraduate was astonished to
discover that Auden “really admired the boring Anglo-Saxon poets” (Carpenter 1981: 55). Auden
himself said of Anglo-Saxon that he was immediately fascinated both by
“its metric and its rhetorical devices” (Carpenter 1981: 52–74). However, he was not
excited by the philological approach of some of his teachers who, very
much against his poetic taste, put too much emphasis on historical
linguistics. The outcome was that in 1928 this brilliant man only got a
third class degree (Jones
2013: 261). Almost fifty years later, in his autobiographical
book The Dyer’s Hand
(1975: 41), Auden makes the following wry comment on this
result: “It is hardly surprising, then, if a young poet seldom does well
in his examinations. If he does, then, either he is also a scholar in
the making, or he is a very good boy indeed.”
2.2Metrical and rhetorical devices in Old and Middle English literature
Even after forty years, Auden’s artistic affection for
Old and Middle English literature appears to have remained unaltered.
Again, in The Dyer’s Hand, he remembers attending a
lecture delivered by Professor 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 of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish. I became willing, therefore, to work at Anglo-Saxon because, unless I did, I should never be able to read this poetry. I learned enough to read it, however sloppily, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.(Auden 1975: 41–2).
Auden was not only fascinated by the metrical devices of
this poetry, but also by a specific rhetorical figure of speech common
to Old Icelandic, Old Norse and Old English, namely kenning (see Wrenn 1967: 48–56). This term
derives from the Old Norse verb kenna, “to know or
recognize” (cf. German and Dutch kennen). It is a
compound metaphorical figure for referring to a subject indirectly, for
example, “helmberend” (“a helmet bearer” and so “a warrior”),
“eardstapa” (“earthstepper” and so “a wanderer”), “wordcraeft”
(“word-strength” and so “eloquence” or “poetic art”). Just leafing
through Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary
(1962) will produce
numerous examples of kennings.
Therefore it is not surprising that Auden’s “The
Wanderer” features various instances of this figure such as “sea-dingle”
(1), a dingle is a valley or a dell and so a place where the sea is
ominously deep. The mysterious compound “place-keepers” (8) is a kenning
for “door or entrance”, while “undried sea” (9) and “houses for fishes”
(10) are kennings for the mysteries of the sea. The lovely word
“day-wishing flowers” (3) are daisies, the etymology of the word “daisy”
being in Old English daeges eage, which is the “day’s
eye” as the flower opens in the morning. Some further imaginative
thinking shows that there is only one step from a kenning like
“day-wishing flowers” to a metaphorical riddle: What flowers open in the
morning and close at night? Answer: Daisies.
The riddle is an ancient and worldwide phenomenon in both
oral tradition (the folk riddle) and written literature (the literary
riddle). As a matter of fact, riddles resemble defamiliarization, which
I define here as a theory and technique in art and literature which
presents familiar objects or situations in an unfamiliar way, prolonging
the perceptive process and allowing for a fresh perspective.
Indeed, Auden cherished a lifelong interest in riddles.
Thus, in his inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford
on 11 June 1956, he said that one of his touchstones for a good literary
critic was their approval of riddles and all other ways of not calling a
spade a spade (Auden
1975: 47).
3.The Anglo-Saxon riddles and poems in the Exeter book
When Auden studied at Oxford, the set texts for the Anglo-Saxon
papers included the seventh edition (1894) of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon
Reader (Jones
2013: 261–62). This volume contained a section entitled
Riddles, Charms, Gnomic Verses, The Battle of
Maldon, The Seafarer (made famous by the modernist poet Ezra
Pound), The Dream of the Rood and The
Wanderer, the last of which obviously providing Auden with the
title of his poem. All these works originate from the so-called
Exeter Book, which is a manuscript or codex of
Anglo-Saxon poetry written around 970 and housed in Exeter Cathedral since
the 11th century. It was donated to the library of Exeter Cathedral by
Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, in 1072. It contains 40 miscellaneous
poems (including The Wanderer), followed by fifty-nine
riddles or enigmata without any further information such as
title, author, notes or suggested solution. Another thirty-four appear at
the end of the manuscript, and two others are interspersed among other
poems. This totals up to ninety-five riddles, which corresponds with the
number translated by Crossley-Holland
(2008). All the same, how many riddles there are exactly is still
a matter of debate because the divisions between them in the manuscript are
not always clear (Higl 2017: 375).
The numbering of the riddles is based on the edition of the Exeter
Book by Krapp and Dobbie
(1936).
Riddles must be seen as an important and integral part of
Anglo-Saxon literature and culture (Nash
2006: 24–5, 166–68). Their dramatic and rhetorical force mainly
derives from their paired alliterative lines in Anglo-Saxon and from the use
of prosopopoei, i.e. personification of inanimate things,
inherited from Latin usage (Wrenn
1967: 171). Here is an example from the Exeter
Book in modern English by Crossley-Holland (2008: 9), who deservedly tries to preserve in
his translation the highly rhythmical alliterative stress patterns from the
Anglo-Saxon original:
5
I’m by nature solitary, scarred by iron
and wounded by sword, weary of battle.
I often see the face of war, and fight
hateful enemies; yet I hold no hope
of help being brought to me in battle
before I’m cut to pieces and perish.
At the city wall sharp-edged swords,
skilfully forged in the flame by smiths,
bite deeply into me. I must await
a more fearsome encounter; it is not for me
to find a physician on the battle field,
one of those men who heals wounds with herbs.
My sword wounds gape wide and wider;
death blows are dealt me by day and by night.
Beneath this riddle in the Anglo-Saxon version follows the
rune for S, which can represent either scyld or
scutum (shield), the first of several riddles in the
Exeter Book concerned with weaponry. There are several
other riddles in the Exeter Book concerned with weaponry
reflecting Anglo-Saxon heroism such as sword and shield, bow and battering
ram. But the primary preoccupation of the riddles is with the everyday lives
of working people and with the description of natural phenomena and domestic
objects.
Perhaps unexpectedly, there are seven “obscene” riddles in the
Exeter Book which are in fact double
entendres describing something which appears obscene but turns
out to be a perfectly innocent object. Here is an example translated by
Crossley-Holland
(2008: 28):
25
I’m a strange creature, for I satisfy women,
a service to the neighbours! No one suffers
at my hands except for my slayer.
I grow very tall, erect in a bed,
I’m hairy underneath. From time to time
a good-looking girl, the doughty daughter
of some churl, dares to hold me,
grips my russet skin, robs me of my head
and puts me in the pantry. At once that girl
with plaited hair who has confined me
remembers our meeting. Her eye moistens.
The apparent answer is “onion” but, obviously, the answer
naughtily hinted at is “penis”. On further reflection, it
is quite intriguing that possibly the very same clerical scribes who worked
for bishop Leofric on the Exeter Book, which was to be
donated to the cathedral library, also had their share in writing the
double entendre riddles. Crossley-Holland comments:
“Pious and ascetic the Anglo-Saxon monks were but, unlike some critics, they
were not prim” (2008: 93).
4.Poetry and play in the Exeter Book riddles
As Higl
(2017: 374) has suggested, the poems and riddles in the
Exeter Book alternate “playfully” between a number of
“sacred” poems such as The Wanderer and The
Seafarer, the riddles on the one hand featuring instances of
downright Anglo-Saxon heroism like the one about the shield and on the
other, featuring the double entendres like the “onion”.
“Playfully” is the key word here. In his prestigious book Homo
Ludens (literally: “playing man”) the famous Dutch historian
and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga calls “play” an essential condition for
and a well-defined and indispensable quality of medieval culture. His
comments make for a fitting end to this short stylistic analysis:
Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules.(Huizinga 1955: 211)
Note
1.In accordance with prevailing bibliographical rules, the
title of Auden’s short poem is put between quotation marks, whereas long
poems, like the Old English The Wanderer, have their
titles in italics.