Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century
- Volume 24, Number 2
- Chris Jones
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- http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/24ii/jones
Abstract
This essay examines the representation or staging of oral performance and poetic composition within Beowulf, in order to argue that poem thematizes and mythologizes its own origins, and is as much interested in recovering the sounds of oral performances that pre-date its own manuscript inscription as modern Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been. The second half of the essay considers the recovery and reimagining of an Anglo-Saxon “soundscape” in the work of two twentieth-century poets, W. S. Graham and Edwin Morgan. The invocation of this “Saxonesque” patterning of sound invokes or triggers a historically constituted set of associations with the whole body of Old English poetry; that is, an allusion to a corpus, rather than to a specific text, is made through sound patterning.
eCompanion
“The Voyages of Alfred Wallis” according to the soundscape of Old English verse (87):
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Worldhauled, he’s grounded on God’s great bank, Keelheaved to Heaven, waved into boatfilled arms, Falls his homecoming leaving that old sea testament, Watching the restless land sail rigged alongside Townfulls of shallows, gulls on sailing roofs. |
“Spacepoem 3: Off Course” (Morgan 1990:268):
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the golden flood the weightless seat the cabin song the pitch black the growing beard the floating crumb the shining rendezvous the orbit wisecrack the hot spacesuit the smuggled mouth-organ |
“Spacepoem 3: Off Course” (Morgan 1990:269):
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the floating lifeline the pitch sleep the crawling camera the turning silence the space crumb the crackling beard the orbit mouth-organ the floating song. |
“Spacepoem 3: Off Course” (Morgan 1990:269):
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the cabin sunrise the hot flood the shining spacesuit the growing moon the crackling somersault the smuggled orbit the rough moon the visionary rendezvous. |
