The Departing Soul's Address to the Body: A Fragment of a Semi-Saxon Poem / Discovered Among the Archives of Worcester Cathedral

The student of our early literature and language is indebted to the zeal of Sir Thomas Phillipps, for the discovery of the following interesting Fragment, which appears to have formed part of a volume that contained Ælfric's Grammar and Glossary, probably of the Twelfth Century. The fragments were discovered among the archives of Worcester Cathedral; and in 1836 Sir Thomas Phillipps printed the whole of them in folio. I know not whether the form or the typographical arrangement has been the cause of the neglect of this publication; but it has escaped both Mr. Wright and Mr. Thorpe. The former, in his interesting edition of The Latin Poems of Walter de Mapes, where he has given the literary history of this legend with extracts, has not even referred to our fragment; nor has Mr. Thorpe adverted to it in his publication of the Codex Exoniensis, which contains an Anglo-Saxon poem of the same kind, with which it is interesting to compare this later version of the legend. There is a portion of another semi-Saxon poem, entitled The Grave, printed in Mr. Conybeare's Illustrations, and by Mr. Thorpe in his Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, which appears to be by the same hand, or at any rate of the same school and age. Indeed some of the lines and thoughts are identical with passages of the following poem. Mr. Thorpe has justly called The Grave a singularly impressive and almost appalling fragment; expressions equally characteristic of that with which the reader is here presented.
This impressive character, coupled with the interest which the fragment possesses, as a specimen of the moral poetry of our ancestors, and as throwing light upon the transition of our language from Saxon to English, has been the motive for producing it in a more legible form than that in which it first appeared.
In one of the smaller poems (No. V.), printed by Mr. Wright with the Owl and the Nightingale, from the Cottonian MS. Calig. A. ix. The sorie sowle maketh hire mone, in language not dissimilar to that used in the following fragment; and the dreary imagery of the house appointed for all living, and the punishment which awaits a wicked life at its close, are painted in an equally fearful manner.