3 - Elegiac Poetry
Summary
THE RUIN
As well-wrought as this wall was
Fate fractured it, smashed this stronghold.
Toppled towers, ruptured rafters
Rot in rubble. Hail-hammered gateways
Crumble with cold. Ruined roofs –
Shattered shower-shields – eaten by age.
Where are the wrights, wielders of wood,
Sculptors in stone? In the grip of the grave,
Gone, long since gone. Deep they decay
While their works wither. This wall weathered
The crashing of kingdoms: stood against storms
Where kinsmen clashed in a splintering of spears.
First the factor, skilled with stone
Agile in art, melted metal
To bolster the base. A wonderful work!
When it was built, bright was the building,
Gorgeously gabled. Masses of men
Milled in the mead-hall, the row of rioters
Rang through the roof. Thickly they thronged,
Proud in their pleasure, choice in their cheer.
But Destiny doomed them,
Dealt them a double blow: pillaged by plague,
Battered by battle, the flower of the folk
Fell. This fort fragmented, and fell to waste,
To rack and ruin. The masons melted away,
The valiant men vanished. Hence are these halls
Desolate and dreary: tiles are torn
From the red roof. Decay has devastated,
Reduced to rubble this peerless pile:
Where once, in old days, a host of heroes
Happy in heart, and glittering with gold,
Fair and wine-flushed, fed on the sight
Of shimmering silver and joyed in gems.
Ravished by riches, gladdened by gold,
They gazed on the splendour of this bright burg,
This celestial city and its circling domains.
The poem we know as ‘The Ruin’ appears on two badly damaged leaves of the Exeter Book: so the original comes down to us, perhaps fittingly, in a dilapidated and fragmentary condition. Towards the end of what remains of the poem, some lines describing the miracles of Roman plumbing begin, and then disintegrate into illegibility; so the translation above is therefore much neater and more finished than the original literary document; a modern reproduction of an artistic construction that appears, in its manuscript form, as to some degree a ruin of itself.
There are a number of references in Anglo-Saxon poetry to the surviving ruins of an ancient civilization, obviously the collapsed remains of Roman occupation.
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- Anglo-Saxon Verse , pp. 39 - 60Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000