Cædmon.
Well, in the year of our Lord 637, this Whitby Abbey was founded by the excellent St. Hilda, and it was under her auspices, and by virtue of her saintly encouragements, that the first true English poet, Cædmon, began to sing his Christian song of the creation. He was but a cattle-tender—unkempt—untaught, full of savagery, but with a fine phrenzy in him, which made his paraphrase of Scripture a spur, and possibly—in a certain imperfect sense, a model for the muse of John Milton.
Of the chaos before creation, he says:—
Earth’s surface was
With grass not yet be-greened; while far and wide
The dusky ways, with black unending night
Did ocean cover.
Of the great Over-Lord God-Almighty, he says—
In Him, beginning never,
Or origin hath been; but he is aye supreme
Over heaven’s thrones, with high majesty
Righteous and mighty.
And again,—that you may make for yourselves comparison with the treatment and method of Milton,—I quote this picture of Satan in hell:—
Within him boiled his thoughts about his heart;
Without, the wrathful fire pressed hot upon him—
He said,—‘This narrow place is most unlike
That other we once knew in heaven high,
And which my Lord gave me; tho’ own it now
We must not, but to him must cede our realm.
Yet right he hath not done to strike us down
To hell’s abyss—of heaven’s realm bereft—
Which with mankind to people, he hath planned.
Pain sorest this, that Adam, wrought of Earth
On my strong throne shall sit, enjoying Bliss
While we endure these pangs—hell torments dire,
Woe! woe is me! Could I but use my hands
And might I be from here a little time—
One winter’s space—then, with this host would I—
But these iron bands press hard—this coil of chains—
…
There is but one known MS. copy of this poem. It is probably of the tenth, certainly not later than the eleventh century, and is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is illuminated, and some scenes represented seem to have been taken from the old miracle plays.[9] It was printed in 1655: in this form a copy is said to have reached the hands of Milton, through a friend of the printer: and it may well be that the stern old Puritan poet was moved by a hearing of it,—for he was blind at this date,—to the prosecution of that grand task which has made his name immortal.