Old English poetry often stops at the threshold of paradise. On the principle that human perception cannot fathom divine joy, poems on the afterlife and paradise tend to limit themselves to abstraction or negative description, to lists of absent miseries. When concrete descriptions of paradise and its delight do play a role in the earliest English devotional poetry – in lines on the creation of the unfallen world, on the lost paradise of Eden, or the allegorical homeland of the phoenix – they must use poetic formulae and conventions drawn from poetry on worldly things. Scholars writing on the idiosyncrasies of paradise in Old English poetry have told us these paradises often look remarkably like the rural, unbounded landscapes that would have been prized in early England.¹ While creation displays natural wonders untainted by death and sin, creation’s natural features are often described in terms of artifice and luxury: the treasures of this world. Even when these paradises look most like pastoral wonderlands, they are works of cultivated artifice, and their accoutrements are decorative adornments. And why not? In praising God as creator, Cædmon’s Hymn styles itself as an ekphrastic work praising the work of the ultimate Creator. For its part, Old English paradise poetry delights not in natural beauty alone, but natural beauty described by means of poetic conventions for the depiction of treasure, of cultivated luxury and artisanal objects that occasion delight in created artifice. These poems insist so emphatically on joy as intrinsic to devotional affect that they find themselves reveling in images of the very worldly luxuries they encourage their audience to leave behind. They insist on beauty, and delight in divine beauty, as fundamental to devotional experience.² As a result, their portrayals of paradise then find themselves negotiating a fraught balance between befitting delight in the artifice of God’s creation and hazardous attachment to the allure of beauty in the world.

The earliest English poetry insists upon exhortations to joy and shared delight as both means and end of proper devotion. To do so, it unites biblical and liturgical exhortations to rejoice in God with one of the most predominant poetic conceits concerned with joy in Old English poetry: depictions of treasure. As Elizabeth Tyler has demonstrated, “pleasure in the description of treasure is one of the most widespread features of Old English verse, and is shared by secular and religious verse alike.”³ The devotional affects of paradise poetry derive from knowledge of the biblical sources of such ideas, but also from the associated affects of Old English poetic conventions through which these texts recreate them as aesthetic devotional experience. The distinctively poetic associated pleasures attendant upon describable worldly treasure lend themselves to the indescribable joys of the world to come, and in turn become a conventional way of describing them. Even the delights of natural paradise are portrayed through the conventions of treasure and luxurious artifice, with God conventionally portrayed as the ultimate artifex. Heavenly joys exceeding the descriptive capacity of earthly language function both as encouragement to devotion and an end in themselves, and joy can serve as an aid to discernment. Herein lies the danger. Spiritual discernment, as Nancy Caciola puts it, refers to “the imperative to test, or to discern, spirits” and involves establishing the difference between true and false spiritual authority.⁴ But misguided discernment may base itself on mistaken mortal perception, may submit itself to the wrong authority, may misfire. From Origen onwards, Christian writers worked to systematize the nature of the spiritual sense, its relationship to physical sense perception, and its relationship to the human capacity to apprehend God.⁵ But rather than elucidate complex systems, Old English poetry works by familiar topoi, or through negating images of what can be perceived through the senses to gesture merely at what cannot. Beauty and delight in the material world, as these poems reveal, may thus be particularly seductive, because they are essential to poetic descriptions of paradise and yet simultaneously a stumbling block to achieving it. Old English conventions of treasure and created, material beauty are simultaneously intrinsic to powerful poetic tradition, and alien to the ideals of “rejection of wealth and the taking on of poverty […] which powerfully influence the whole church,” as Tyler observes.⁶ Some joys are more legitimate and durable; others are perverse or corrupting. Poetic depictions of treasure and skilled artifice evoke joy, but importantly, also the impossibility of worldly joy’s endurance: “[T]reasure often stands as an image of transience.”⁷ Old English devotional poetry must thus use its powerful associations to create alienation from those same associated pleasures, to redirect them to higher indescribable objects. While these latter sorts of joys are portrayed as fleeting and potentially hazardous, properly directed joys in God and his creation are nothing less than the end for which humanity had been created and to which it must endeavor to return.⁸

This chapter shows that devotional feeling in Old English poetry does not restrict itself to sympathy or grief in the face of suffering and death, the affects explored in Chapter 1. In fact, Old English poetry also insists upon joy, and delight in and love for creation. But the delight that it presents is anything but simple, because delight in beauty raises problems, including problems of perception. The ways of negotiating these problems in early English verse are represented by two poems in particular: the Old English Phoenix, a translation of Lactantius’ De ave phoenice, and the Old English Genesis, especially the portion known as Genesis B, translated from the verse Old Saxon Genesis. The Phoenix demonstrates the importance of delight in created beauty, and poetic conventions thereof, directed to proper devotional ends. Yet the Genesis poems show just how fraught cultivating and properly directing that delight can be, as delight in beauty can also lead the heart astray. While ascertaining the precise date and provenance of these poems is problematic, they adapt earlier sources – the Vulgate, as well as verse in Latin and Old Saxon – and thus show how Old English poetry digested and remade existing devotional literature (biblical, liturgical, and devotional verse from other language traditions) by means of its own vernacular poetic conventions. Reading these poems alongside one another demonstrates how early English devotional literature negotiated the kinds of complexities both medieval and modern authors have grappled with before and since. These struggles, indeed, provide the poignant motivation of this art.

Objects of Affection

Sweetness, as Mary Carruthers tells us, was a prevailing aesthetic category in the Middle Ages; a gustatory metaphor for aesthetic and affective pleasure.⁹ As she has shown, devotional experience in particular is described as sweet, although the particular gustatory analogy imagined may not have been the sugary taste that would occur to modern readers.¹⁰ An instance of this metaphor occurs when digested knowledge is described as “sweet to belch” in the Old English Boethius – an illustration drawn out well beyond what a modern reader might have considered good taste.¹¹ Yet this is one of many instances in which sweetness, positive aesthetic perception, and joyful affective responses to such sweet perceptions are affirmed in Old English literature, both in themselves and as instruments of higher spiritual understanding.¹² But some things that are sweet may be dangerous. In Juliana, for example, we meet a demon who sweetens sin.¹³ Although Juliana remains impervious to the demon’s wiles, the episode reveals that the faithful must be alert to affective influence and to the objects that affect them. How were the faithful to manage the influence of sweetnesses deriving from sinful excess as opposed to the sweetness of proper devotion? And for writers seeking to portray the sweetness of devotion, how could the terms of worldly sweetness ever approach the sweetness of the world to come?

The earliest English writers negotiated these difficulties, considering how Old English poems such as The Phoenix and Genesis adapt their poetic source texts, and the biblical and liturgical sources behind them, to represent paradise and the affects associated with it. These adaptations complement the aesthetic strategies investigated in Chapter 3, which considers poems on the Final Judgment: While the end of the world confronts penitents with the stark realities of sin and damnation, it also holds out the only possibility of lasting joy. The idea of paradise, however, requires some clarifying. Ananya Kabir has demonstrated that English tradition before the Conquest paid particular attention to “an ‘interim paradise,’ or paradise as an antechamber to heaven”; that concept of an interim paradise would later become more closely associated with already-extant concepts of purgatory.¹⁴ This interim paradise might be elided with the Garden of Eden, and might “as frequently merge with heaven as it could be distinguished from it.”¹⁵ This amorphous, broad concept of paradise underlies the various types of paradises portrayed in the poems this chapter must consider. As Alastair Minnis has demonstrated of the later Middle Ages, paradise gave medieval writers “an enabling context, perhaps even a transformative space, for thought wherein the present-day situation of humankind could be set aside.”¹⁶ Consequently, in poetic texts in particular, a given image of paradise may not refer simply to heaven or Eden or constitute a metaphor for one or the other. In this chapter, then, the term paradise refers to celestial, terrestrial, or figurative spaces free of the sin, death, sickness, and malice understood to result from humanity’s fall; paradise is a poetic space in these texts more than a theologically precise concept. Beyond the familiar catalogues of earthly miseries that are negated in order to describe these indescribable places, these poems may also be filled with lush scenery, verdant landscapes, and exquisitely fashioned luxuries.

Depictions of joy, salvation, and sensual delight in pre-Conquest English poetry have attracted comparatively little attention. One explanation for this oversight may be the aesthetic limitations of speaking the ineffable: Heaven cannot be depicted well in terms available to worldly sense perception, because it cannot be sensed through worldly human means; the New Testament emphasizes that believers “shall rejoice with joy unspeakable” (I Pet. 1:8) while Paul hears in his vision of heaven “secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter” (II Cor. 12:4).¹⁷ This leaves some, but not all, descriptions of paradise either abstract or expressed primarily in terms of the lack of the catalogued litany of horrors existing in hell and on earth. But the very impossibility of describing the indescribable makes portrayals of paradise so poignant and enticing: To portray paradise is to invoke desire for what can never be had in earthly life precisely in the terms of earthly life and indeed earthly desires. Kathleen Barrar has argued that while Old English depictions of paradise draw upon ideas of Eden, they may more closely resemble unbounded rural landscapes, “[l]ands worth acquiring” in their own world: lands “fertile, relatively flat, little occupied [which] have plenty of valuable woodland and good, temperate climate.”¹⁸ We find earthly paradises of various kinds described in detail: the Garden of Eden in Genesis, the land in The Phoenix, the creation song in Beowulf. By contrast, there are comparatively few glimpses of the heaven itself: at the end of The Phoenix, in some of the poems on Judgment Day, and in the end of the late eleventh-century Liber confortatorius.

In the midst of rural landscapes of paradise, however, we find God’s creation described in language that evokes human artifice: frætwas, gimmas, beagas (adornments, gems, rings). These and other details suggest a fixation upon beauty and luxury objects beyond utility to humans, artifice superfluous to practical ends. These characteristics bear two implications. First, these depictions of paradise insist upon joy as an intrinsic element of human experience, and upon joy for its own sake rather than simply to encourage acceptance of difficult practice or understanding. Second, poetic conventions of human artifice suggest a delight in creation akin to the delight taken in luxury objects and worldly wealth. Although the love of such worldly things must be rejected, the language and associations of that experience work to represent aesthetically delight beyond human understanding in objects beyond human sensory experience.

These objects of delight in these poems are poetic and devotional topoi, and as such they build upon existing affective associations. Sara Ahmed has written about the complicated relationship between happiness and the objects that it takes – happiness, in her formulation, is an orientation toward an object, even though, in Modern English at least, we speak of being affected by an object that acts upon us.¹⁹ But for medieval writers, such orientation was cultivated. In the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste would draw on Avicenna to suggest that “our affectus should operate like a guide or helper toward delectable food which at our present time in our fallen state the mind or soul is unable to taste or sense.”²⁰ Although Old English writers had neither Grosseteste nor Avicenna to draw upon, the vernacular understanding of the mind nonetheless framed affective states largely as embodied action.²¹ Deploying the poetic topoi for created beauty in Old English enables a way of cultivating the proper associated affects, particularly proper delight. While both the language for and the cultural implications of delighting in objects has changed since the early Middle Ages, we see an active concern in early medieval English devotional poetry for how objects are perceived by the senses, for which affects are provoked by perceptions of various objects, and how these affects are themselves actions of the will.²² As Ahmed writes, “certain objects become imbued with positive affect as good objects,” but the “taste” for such objects “is acquired over time.”²³ The poems in the present chapter concern themselves with good affective associations with good objects, but also the potential for that affect to adhere wrongly, such as at the temptation of Eve in Genesis B. The difficulty of distinguishing between good objects appears in Eve’s own difficulty in distinguishing the truth of what she perceives and how she should respond to it. More than troubling the didactic value of the verse or leaving problematic ambiguities, however, these parallel difficulties narratively embody an experience that more straightforward instruction could not: the difficulty of the verse narrative as it represents difficulties of perception reveals the urgency and danger of perceiving well. At the same time, it emphasizes the importance of beauty and delight, and cultivates its audiences’ capacity to perceive them.

The Phoenix, as allegory, represents one kind of verse, while the Old English Genesis poems represent a retelling of biblical narrative, and both texts mingle their narratives with Old English poetic convention. Particularly the section of Genesis known as Genesis B, itself translated from Old Saxon, departs strikingly from the biblical account and does much more than convey biblical history in the vernacular. We will see that a basic understanding of the story of creation and fall, a fundamental subject of catechism, must precede a reader’s experience of the poem for the implications of the narrative to make sense. As devotional tools, the Old English Genesis poems conjure an aesthetic experience of devotional ideas, affectively evoking devotional associations. Helen Gittos has rightly cautioned that surviving vernacular texts were likely made by and for intellectual elites and that, despite conventional protestations to the contrary, the production of vernacular texts attests to their confidence in English rather than a lack of confidence in their Latinity.²⁴ At the same time, Virginia Day has compellingly argued that many Old English devotional poems reflect the requirements for the narratio prescribed for catechetical instruction, which presented “an exposition of Christian cosmology and history” beginning with the creation, proceeding through to the Last Judgment and focusing on the hope of redemption throughout.²⁵ As Day notes, Bede’s “famous description of the corpus of Cædmon’s poetry is no less than a description of the catechetical narratio as well.”²⁶ Yet these parallels do not, of course, suggest that poems such as the Old English Genesis would have served a catechetical purpose; as I argue later, the Genesis poems in particular feature allusions to and departures from biblical narrative that would have confused a hypothetical catechumen.²⁷ Rather, to the literate elites who would have produced and circulated devotional poetry, the allusions to catechism, liturgy, and hexameral traditions would have lent to this poetry the aesthetic sense of dignitas that Bede recognized in the similarly catechetical poetry of Cædmon.²⁸ Reading these poems alongside one another, we see not only how felt engagement was intrinsic to the work of these poems. We also see how the mixing of vernacular poetic forms with Christian allegorical, biblical, and homiletic conventions did not produce easily digestible lessons for unlearned audiences, but deeply complex meditations on the experience of divine joy and on the possibility of art to explore it.

Landscapes of Luxury in The Phoenix

The Old English poem known as The Phoenix presents a vivid allegory of resurrection set in a fantastical paradise. Yet the Old English Phoenix excites this devotional delight at a distance. The allusive nature of the poem’s allegorical content relies upon preexisting affective associations its audience must have with delight in paradise and hope for eternal joy. The phoenix’s paradise is a richly complex landscape. Not only does it display nature untainted by death and sin, but the paradise’s natural features are also prominently described in conventional poetic terms of the luxurious artifice characteristic of the postlapsarian world: frætwas (adornments) and gimmas (gems) and all manner of luxury items. Throughout the poem, images of gems and treasure – conventional in Old English heroic poetry – combine with natural imagery only implicitly suggesting, at first, paradise and resurrection through the allegory of the phoenix rising from its own ashes. In its complex affective work, The Phoenix uses these beautiful images of the very worldly luxuries it warns its audience to reject in order to portray the ineffable paradise it urges them toward. This work relies upon both the affects associated with worldly delight – the taste of fruit, the glimmer of gems – and those that a receptive medieval audience would have with the waning world in which those things take place. The poignancy of these images is the very knowledge that such delights cannot last, and the only hope of lasting joy lies not in them but in those of a world not yet seen.

The poem’s loving fixation upon beautiful objects beyond utility to humans, delights superfluous to practical ends, shows how its depictions of paradise insist upon joy as an intrinsic element of devotional experience. The Phoenix insists upon joy for its own sake rather than simply as an instrument to understanding. Just as importantly, its language of artificial objects suggests a fusing of poetic and devotional conventions, a hybrid aesthetic that unites the associations of both. Because the love of worldly things must be rejected by the devout Christian, the language and associations of worldly luxury become displaced in the poem, to represent for its audience delight beyond human understanding in objects beyond human sense, beyond the aesthesis, or perception, possible in the present world. As the poem turns toward the response of those who hear the phoenix’s song, and as these hearers are moved by its beauty to their own songs of praise in turn, the poem paradoxically embraces artifice while rejecting worldly delights for eternal joy.

Modern critical responses to The Phoenix have generally read the poem as overt if well-executed allegory, its lush imagery ultimately falling away in favor of the moral lessons at its end. Such readings miss the poem’s play upon the affective associations of its imagery and how they worked upon medieval audiences. Modern readers tend to consider moral lessons and aesthetic pleasure as distinct categories, even when we admit that the latter may encourage the former. This disjunction does not operate for the poet of The Phoenix, to whom the modern stark distinction of head and heart would have been alien. As Leslie Lockett writes, “the divide between reason and emotion that we rely heavily upon in Modern English was little used by Old English authors.”²⁹ In this early medieval paradigm, it makes little sense to think of emotional appeals that subside in favor of rational lessons. Rather, emotion and reason work in concert, and must be used, controlled, and actively engaged in devotional discourse and practice. Even when the allegorical imagery of The Phoenix fades in its closing lines, the affective engagement provoked by that imagery does not. The intricate relationship between sense perception and delight in God’s created work that develops throughout the poem only reaches its culmination as the poem progresses from symbols to the thing itself.

The Phoenix reinterprets and expands Lactantius’ Carmen de ave phoenice, making 677 lines of Old English out of a mere 170 lines of Latin, drawing on numerous other Latin poems as well.³⁰ As a Christian allegory, The Phoenix has often been understood one-dimensionally, as a work with a straightforward message, and any departures from that perceived simplicity have been seen as poetic failures rather than sophistication. Thus for N. F. Blake, the relationship between the “symbol and the thing symbolised” cannot be emphasized enough.³¹ He writes:

Blake’s position is worth quoting at length, not least because he is right that the phoenix’s symbolic worth cannot be quarantined from evaluations of the poem’s aesthetic potency. Yet Blake’s reduction of allegory to didactic verse precludes the possibility of reading further. His reading sets out the diametrically opposed possibilities for reading didactic verse in the starkest terms: On the one hand are those who discard the worth of the allegorical content in their appreciation of the poem’s beautiful imagery, and on the other are those who must discard the poem’s beautiful imagery as the wrapper for an allegorical message. In such an approach, allegory and beauty constitute distinct categories, and appreciation for the one entails devaluing the other.

In a direct rebuttal of Blake, Daniel Calder argues that beauty does play an essential role in this poem. Calder argues that “The Phoenix is not a formal Christian allegory” but a “rendering of the relationship between beauty and salvation.”³³ As such, Calder argues, Blake “misses entirely the point of the phoenix’s beauty.”³⁴ In Calder’s formulation, the poem’s “vision of paradise contains implicitly the foundation for a Christian aesthetic in the importance given to beauty, and this importance relates directly the contemplation of the divine being, himself the source of all beauty.”³⁵ Calder’s reading of the poem emphasizes the artifice of creation, and God’s role as “artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit in parvis” (“great artisan in great things, in such a way that he is not less in small things”).³⁶ Yet even for Calder, the poem ultimately “transcends sensuous splendour” when “the redemptive value and purpose of the bird are fulfilled.”³⁷ The poet’s use of “[p]aradise and the phoenix, as intermediate symbols, have faded into the background as the poet presses the final connection of man to heaven, though these symbols have served their function of uniting the disparate and complex elements contained in the several allegorical perspectives.”³⁸ In the end, Calder does not depart from Blake’s categories after all. For Calder, as for Blake, The Phoenix is an instrument: Its beauty is indispensable but finally instrumental and secondary to moral and salvific messages. In their convergence as much as in their disagreement, Blake and Calder reveal the difficulty of The Phoenix – that is, the problem of the poem’s beauty and the divine beauty it represents, and whether such beauty is necessary or superfluous to devotional poetry. Through decades of scholarship on The Phoenix, an opposition between the poem’s beauty and its moral content has remained. Read simply as an allegory, The Phoenix is an instrument – its beauty instrumental and secondary to moral and salvific messages. Yet The Phoenix, as we will see, resists these readings precisely because of how much it declines to “transcend sensuous splendour” in relation to the divine beauty it presents.

The Phoenix says nothing about the phoenix at first. The narrator begins instead with what he has heard about a singular (ænlic) land, far from the sinful inhabitants of the present one.³⁹ The Phoenix gives us a promised land, portrayed as a delight to each of the senses. To be sure, the absence of the discomforts of this world is promised by negation:

Here the absent miseries are partly concrete (the loss of life, the harsh weather) yet largely general (the absence of sin and sorrow). Helen Appleton has argued that the expanded description of this landscape reflects a particularly English vernacular “imaginaire,” allowing the phoenix’s homeland to “represent a lost Eden, while foreshadowing the permanent home in heaven.”⁴⁰ Indeed, this scene follows a more concrete description of the allegorical æþelest londa (noblest of lands) that the Phoenix inhabits (line 2b). Two pairs of rhyming half-lines in this description – sacu and sarwracu, gewin and onsyn – assert a formal link with the opening catalogue describing this paradise:

Contrary to the extremes of life on earth, the envisioned paradise teems with blossoms and fruit, the cliffs do not loom too high, and the noble field lies fertile – wynnum geblowen (blooming with joys; line 27b). We do see numerous concrete details of this paradise: plentiful welling streams, woods, and leaves and fruits that do not fade: “wæstmas ne dreosað, / beorhte blede, | ac þa beamas a / grene stondað, | swa him god bibead” (the fruits do not rot, nor the bright leaves, but the trees always stand green, as God commanded them; lines 34–6). That God commanded this Edenic land to remain fertile and deathless prefigures the poem’s larger point: Even when the poetic descriptions are most concrete and aesthetically comprehensible to human sense, they are alien to the ways that such things would operate on earth. This paradise bears features that a human might expect, but in ways that defy expectations:

In the land the phoenix inhabits, there are blossoms and fruit, the cliffs are not too high, and the fields always fertile. Yet while the descriptions are concrete they are alien and otherworldly: only the adjective edniwe (renewed) suggests a need for the verdant scene to be refreshed, much less to die and be replenished. The poem constructs this landscape as the creative work of God by speaking of it in conventional Old English poetic language of human artifice: The sun is gimma gladost (brightest of gems; line 289a), the fruits are the holtes frætwe (adornments of the woods; line 73b), and the whole “[l]ond beoð gefrætwad” by the “wuldres gim” (the land adorned by the gem of glory; lines 116b-17). When the phoenix is reborn, the land is reborn with it:

These fruits are worldly treasures, adornments of the earth. When the poem turns its audience’s attention from the worldly to the divine, the sort of pleasure they might have found in worldly luxury is not extinguished but redirected to worthier objects. The poem repeatedly speaks of the land in terms of gems and adornments; like these it is bright and beautiful. As Tyler has demonstrated, the conventional linking of frætwe with terms for land is a distinctive feature of Old English poetic convention that seldom occurs in Old English prose: “expressions for the ornamentation of the land seem to be at once highly conventional in Old English poetry, but not a feature of ordinary language.”⁴¹ In The Phoenix in particular, the landscape is described as finely wrought luxury because it is to be understood as such: Natural beauty is the artifice of the creator.

Because most of the initial description of paradise follows the Latin De aue phoenice, the features the Old English poem adds are all the more striking. The Latin poem likewise opens in a beautiful paradise, open and flat: “Illic planities tractus diffundit apertos” (The space spreads forth, the open plains in that place).⁴² Where the Latin source offers natural beauties, trees and waters, these are described in literal terms or through classical allusion (lines 9–14). The Phoenix poet retains the referents of the Latin poem’s allusions to Phaeton, Phoebus, and Aurora, but depersonifies them into images of the sun and dawn as the poem takes its Old English form. Yet the Old English poem’s interest in treasure is all its own. In the Latin, fruits are simply mitia poma – ripe fruits; the Old English remakes these as frætwas, adornment (line 30). The Latin confines any mention of adornment or luxury to its account of the rebirth of the phoenix, over halfway through the poem, and this language crucially only pertains to the body of the phoenix itself and not to the paradise it inhabits. The Latin poem’s phoenix preserves its ashes with balsameus (balsam), myrrae (myrrh), and tus (frankincense; line 119), its red color is compared to both crimson stones and flowers, mixed with a green likened to emerald (uiridans zmaragdus; line 135), her head appears set with gems (gemmea; line 136). This imagery only describes the phoenix in the Latin, and only after its rebirth. When her head is set with a crown, it is likened to that belonging to Phoebus (line 140). Her connection to the god of music may explain the songs that are sung for her, as her appearance clearly occasions delight in those who see her by the end of the poem, but the gems that adorn her do not announce themselves as artifice per se, and they certainly do not feature in or describe the paradise in which she dwells so clearly as do the gems littered throughout the Old English Phoenix.

In the Old English, the phoenix is from its first introduction wondrously beautiful, but we have to take the poet’s word for this at first: The first physical description of the phoenix only begins over 200 lines later, nearly halfway through the poem, and after the phoenix has burned and been reborn. Like the landscape it inhabits, the bird’s features are compared to works of human artifice:

There is no comparand for this language in the Latin poem; only in the Old English are the phoenix’s eyes like jewels set in gold, and this echoes language describing the sun just before. The poet compares the feathers of the phoenix’s neck to metalwork, invoking the craft of smiths not merely to compare the phoenix to finely wrought works of artifice, but to remind us that the phoenix is an object of delight, as a finely wrought work of artifice: that of the heavenly creator and more immediately of the poet himself.

The poem moves from dazzling landscape to the phoenix moving over and through it, waiting for the sun to rise over the sea at the end of each night. As the sun rises the phoenix arises with it:

Beyond sight and sound, the poem appeals to the taste of the salt sea, and to the feel of motion, of feathers in flight. The imagery engages as many bodily senses as possible simultaneously, invoking the joy of the bird and of those who hear its song – not only is the phoenix itself joyful, its joyful song provokes a similar response in others:

The phoenix’s song has no particular content. Its value lies purely in the sensuous pleasure of perceiving it: The phoenix sings blissum hremig (exultant with joy) with onbryrded breostsefa (animated heart; line 126). Created beauty becomes the occasion for delight, which in turn becomes the occasion for further beauty as the phoenix produces its song in response to the world around it. The song has no content or practical utility, but is better than any songcræft, any music produced by human training or skill:

While dismissing the instruments of human artifice, the poem nonetheless invokes trumpets, melodies, and worldly joys. Their use as a comparand at all evokes the inexpressible delight of the phoenix’s song. These worldly images fail to capture the inexpressible, and that is the poem’s strategy – as it makes explicitly clear in the poem’s denouement, the imagery offers a sketch of a shadow. Its very inadequacy gestures at the greater beauty to come.

To perceive the phoenix’s song is to perceive God’s artifice, to know that it is marked by the same motif as the luxurious creation: as a frætwe fæger (a beautiful adornment), conveying affective knowledge of the ultimate creator (line 330a). The vision provokes a response, as humans wundrian (wonder), and make written records of the details of the phoenix’s appearance and seek to capture its likeness in marble (lines 331–5). Even other birds respond by praising the creator of the phoenix with their own creation, a song of praise. At the same time, the nations witnessing this spectacle make known what they have witnessed. The phoenix itself is called the duguða wyn, the delight of the peoples (line 348b). Perceiving the phoenix provokes a creative response, both in humans and other birds, who him gefylgan ne mæg (may not follow him), neither to his ancient home nor in the exceeding beauty that he presents to them (line 347b). That the poem represents the phoenix as both beauty and joy reveals its devotional as well as its aesthetic understanding. The creatures’ delight in beauty inspires a creative response, wonder, and joy, and these provoke further creation and further joy.

As the description of the phoenix comes to a close, the poem’s allegory of the divine builds to its culmination: Like God, the phoenix is both father and son in and of itself.⁴³ The phoenix’s body is not only a work of divine artifice but a text in which can be read the narrative of salvation history. Like Christ, the phoenix does not mourn his own death, but “symle wat / æfter ligþræce | lif edniwe, / feorh æfter fylle” (always knows renewed life after fire-strife, life after death; lines 369b–71a). Like Christ, the phoenix looks forward to rebirth. At line 381, an abrupt swa introduces the lesson that had been coming all along – as marvelous as the phoenix is, so (swa) are any who choose to be like it:

Only now does the poem overtly introduce the relevant moral lesson, although the Edenic landscape, themes of death and rebirth, and talk of eternal life of course suggest the analogy long before. While there is sarwracu (sore suffering) and deorc deað (dark death), the poem places the blessed already æfter and þurh these things; these are transient, but life and joy are eternal: ece, a, sindreamas. All the blessed must do is wunian and neotan – remain, and enjoy what has been given to them. If the promise of joy is instrumental to encouraging the sort of work that attains this joy, this joy is also the end of such work. The delight in the poem’s forms embodies not only the aesthetic end of the verse but, by analogy, the end of humanity.

The end of the poem goes so far as to frame the attack of the devil and the fall of humanity as a loss of joy. In Eden, we are told, there was “nænges […] / eades onsyn” (no lack of happiness; lines 397–8) and “niwe gefea” (new joy; line 400a). The joyless envy of the devil provokes his giving forbidden fruit to humanity, whose experience becomes bitter, full of yrmþu (miseries), a sarlic symbel (grievous feast; lines 401–6). Bodily and affective suffering intertwine as the bitterness evokes both taste and anguish and the bodily metaphor of eating occasions affective suffering. Their toþas idge (busy teeth) synecdochally are repaid for their guilt; that punishment in turn takes the form of God’s affective response: his yrre (rage) and bittre bealosorge (bitter baleful sorrow; lines 407–9). The now geomormode (sorrowful) humans have given up the eðles wyn (joys of the homeland; lines 411–12). The lines build through associations and oppositions: the beauty and goodness of the paradise, the bodily acts and bodily suffering, the affective suffering being itself embodied experience.

In the final sections, the good deeds of believers must involve their affective orientation. Good deeds and clean thoughts are not enough, but must involve the appropriate affect:

Instruction is something that must be held hotly in the heart; this and the attendant welling or surging of the heart invoke the hydraulic model of the mind central to the vernacular tradition.⁴⁴ This extreme affective and bodily response is both a reaction and a means to the love of God, and is prescribed continuously – by day and by night. The phrase dryhten lufiað (love the lord) parallels gleafan leofne ceoseð (choose dear belief) in the following line, connecting love and choice, affect and will. Instruction or intellectual assent cannot suffice alone. Believers must actively hold to love and hope, and hope restores the state of joy that was lost with paradise. Here the poem introduces the problem of delight in things that take away from the wynne hyht (the hope of joy) that comes with salvation – this is the woruldwela (worldly wealth) which importantly differs from the adornments of paradise. This woruldwela points to the poem’s central aesthetic problem: As The Phoenix evokes delight through evocative imagery of worldly adornments, the same evocative Old English poetic conventions that do so must also direct that delight not to further worldly artifice but to the divine Artifex to whose works these earthly ones pale in comparison. Delight in beautiful objects figures as the poem’s central strategy for cultivating yearning for paradise, but such delight looms as the primary stumbling block that might foreclose its possibility. This problem is why those who choose the geleafa leof (dear belief) have, as yet, only the hope of joy (wynne hyht) rather than wyn itself. The læne lif (transitory life) chosen by those without hope echoes the very different lean (reward) offered to the saved only a few lines earlier (line 475b). The hot and surging hearts of believers possess a delight defined by desire for what awaits them, rather than delight in the life that surrounds them. Delight in the Creator’s work brings joy, but remaining in the fleeting delights of this world brings none. The poem does not, after all, transcend sensuous beauty but transforms it into worship, using the hybrid associations of poetic and devotional conventions, including delight in things such as wrought gold or gemstones. It refuses to leave behind joy in finely wrought creation, even as it must use the language of this world to convey the joys of the next.

The poem carries on these subtle but significant distinctions through the culminating verses. In visions of Judgment Day, we see the perishing luxuries of this world:

Yet as the images of adornment are taken away here, the poem replaces them with something very similar: God shining from his throne, as the wlitig wuldres gim (bright gem of glory; line 516a). Those æþelan (noble ones) who are saved are called the wyrta wynsume (joyful sprouts; lines 528–29), again evoking the phoenix’s paradise as they are made new as it had been. The terror of the old world’s death is quickly replaced by joy in song raised by the righteous. Finally, the saved are “fægre gefrætwed, | fugle gelicast, / in eadwelum | æþelum stencum” (fairly adorned, most like the bird, in the blessed noble scents; lines 585–6). At the moment when delight in material or sensory objects seems to be withdrawn, it is brought back in a purer form. The heavenly paradise permits only slightly less detailed physical description than had the paradise of the phoenix – there is the absence of thirst and hunger and heat, of course, and the presence of songs of praise. While a terrestrial paradise, even a truly idyllic one, may be imagined, the aesthetic limitations of human language and conventional poetic imagery drawn from the everyday world can only partly convey heaven. What is conveyed nevertheless is the endurance of delight, of the affective associations of such imagery, in the sounds and sights of heaven, and the delight in the fulfillment of the yearning that had defined the believer during life.

Ultimately, the phoenix fades only slightly from the foreground of the poem, falling away as prefigurations of paradise give way to the real thing at the poem’s close. But beauty and art survive this transformation: Even as the poem closes, new songs arise within it, sung by those in heaven. The conventional adornments of Old English poetry interact with conventional formulations of eternal life. The poem alternates between praise of Christ and the phoenix that signifies him. In its macaronic closing lines, the poem alternates between English and Latin half-lines, between the vernacular and the language of scripture and liturgy:

The form of these final hortatory lines embodies the hybridity of the poem’s aesthetic through its language. As the poem shifts to another language it shifts also to another plane – both one higher, and one familiar as the language of the church. The spectacular bird leaves the scene, but the bird’s aesthetic power lingers to be enjoyed by those who sing eternal praise to God. Even at the end when symbols have fallen away, both joy and artifice remain. The poem’s own artifice may be intermediate, as it only gestures toward what its language cannot express and what neither its audience nor author could fully comprehend, but the work of the divine artifex is not. Even when any instrumental value of song has passed because the ostensible goal has been attained, song and joy remain as the end and essence of devotion. In this, we see that critical arguments on the poem’s didacticism fall short of comprehending what verse itself teaches: The Phoenix insists that the beauty of this heavenly paradise, and of the songs that fill its air, must be good in and of themselves. Its argument on this point relies on premises that it need not state nor explicate at length: They abide already in the audience’s assocations with luxury objects, especially with poetic formulaic conventions surrounding treasure, and the devotional literary convictions of the transitoriness of the present world.

The necessity of beauty and its essential goodness defines The Phoenix. Its use of the Old English poetic conventions of treasure and beauty evoke associations of enjoyment of artifice that the poem never entirely abandons, even in its overtly eschatological denouement. Imagery and allegory in The Phoenix cannot, finally, be separated nor subordinated to one another even if both are in the end only figures of the Paradise to come. Amid its complex projections of devotional affect through allegorical figures and vernacular tropes, The Phoenix thus shows how affect and artifice are essential to early English devotion. But in the Genesis poems, this problem of perception bears ultimate significance within the drama of the Fall. Joy is still the end of humanity, but also plays its role in humanity’s end.

The Old English Genesis: The Fall in Two Acts

Retellings of the Genesis story require pulling back the veil on unfallen humanity: representing what no one alive has ever seen, what human language has never been made to utter. The Old English retellings look toward paradise, cultivating longing for unfallen beauty and modeling affective joy in an unfallen world beyond this one. In these works, while created beauty may be truth, perceiving true beauty and responding with appropriate joy involves a number of difficulties for our human protagonists as well as for their early English authors and audiences.

The Genesis poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 comprise two distinct pieces of poetry, knitted together, known respectively as Genesis A and Genesis B.⁴⁵ The poem survives in a single copy dating from about the year 1000, later purchased by Dutch scholar Franciscus Junius and published by him in 1655.⁴⁶ Like the biblical creation account itself, this poetic text represents a juxtaposition of sources with different aesthetics and styles, and portrays markedly different aspects of the story of the beginning of the world. While these appear as a single poem in the unique manuscript witness, the lines comprising Genesis B (lines 235 to 851 of the modern edition) present such a different dialect, style, and narrative that their origin as a separate translation from Old Saxon was inferred even before fragments of the Old Saxon original were found.⁴⁷ Since Old Saxon and Old English are mutually intelligible dialects and Genesis B preserves Old Saxon forms more or less intact, A. N. Doane observes that “[i]t is innacurate […] to speak of a ‘translation’ at all.”⁴⁸ Although Genesis B is thus perhaps an Old Saxon rather than Old English literary production, this distinction seems to have meant little either to the interpolator or to the copyist of Junius 11 who, as Doane puts it, “had no concern for what was or was not ‘Old English.’”⁴⁹ The poem attests to the multilingual landscape of early English literature. While we should thus consider Genesis B a distinct poem with an Old Saxon accent, the extant Old English Genesis reflects the permeability and complexity of its literary culture, and its survival in the Junius manuscript represents the reception of an earlier composite poem.⁵⁰ The Old English Genesis actually presents two visions of paradise: a vision of heaven and a more extensive description of the Garden of Eden. While Genesis A adheres to the Vulgate text and other retellings of the biblical narrative and Genesis B also adheres to its Old Saxon original (now surviving only in fragments), both texts contend with the paradox of representing paradises that are at once the ultimate fulfillment of human desire and, by that token, beyond the capacity of worldly human language and sense.

Genesis A opens in conventional poetic exhortation, establishing significant syntactic parallels: “Us is riht micel | ðæt we rodera weard, / wereda wuldorcining, | wordum herigen, / modum lufien” (Most right it is for us that we should praise with words, love with spirits, the guardian of the heavens, the glorious king of the multitudes; Genesis A, lines 1–3a). The paratactic link between rodera weard (guardian of the heavens) and wereda wuldorcining (glorious king of multitudes) invokes God’s protection of the heavens and of the multitudes within. But more crucially, the link between the subjunctive wordum herigen (should praise with words) and modum lufien (should love with [our] spirits) connect love with praise – lofien would have fit the verse just as well as lufien – as well as word with mind or spirit. This language establishes the need for profound affective devotion, suggesting that words of praise go hand in hand with loving God in mind and spirit. That this poem itself presents words of praise establishes the affective tone for what follows, and explicitly prescribes the devotional response it intends to provoke. Here the creation account in Genesis A departs from the biblical Genesis 1, which describes how the creation was divided into heaven and earth, and the celestial bodies were set in the heavens, before focusing primarily upon the features of the earth and its inhabitants. Rather, Genesis A begins with the features and inhabitants of the heavens, asserting from the outset the heavenly paradise that awaits humanity in spite of the paradise that will be lost in the rest of the poem’s narrative. Like many earthly paradises, this one is laid out wide and side (widely and broadly; line 10b), filled with the heavenly hosts. These hosts hold the heavens soðfæst and swiðfeorm (righteous and sustaining; line 9a), but just as importantly have gleam and dream (splendor and joy) and beorht bliss (bright bliss) in the presence of their creator (lines 12b–14a). They are swiðe gesælige (greatly blessed) as they enthusiastically (lustum) sing praise (line 18). Even this relatively specific description takes shape as the antithesis of earthly life: The angels do not know sin, and thus far none of them have learned pride (18b–25). Upon this fairly abstract paradise, catastrophe falls.⁵¹

The fall of the angels becomes concrete, however, with the illustrations of Junius 11.⁵² In the text it accompanies, this fall occurs initially as a failure of proper affect, in which the experience of the heavenly realms produces in some of them not joy and bliss but a gielp (boast or pride) that they may themselves distribute and hold sway over the wuldorfæst wic (glorious dwelling). This perverse affect in turn produces further negative affects – sar (affliction), æfst (hate), and oferhygd (pride) – particularly in the angel who first conceives what is for now only called unræd (bad counsel, or more literally, un-counsel; lines 25–31). These crimes acquire specificity and material reality as this angel begins to speak and attempts to establish a home in the northern regions of the heavenly kingdom. The punishment fits the crime: God who had once honored this angel with glory becomes angry and builds a wræclic ham (wretched home) for the traitorous angel in place of the glorious one he had sought for himself (lines 36–8). In direct contrast to the paradise of heaven, this one is “deop, dreama leas” (deep, deprived of joys; line 41a) and “geondfolen fyre and færcyle” (completely filled with fire and terrible cold; line 43). This bare description simply reverses the previous description of heaven, and other than the few physical motions of God raising his hand (“honda arærde”; line 50) and grasping the rebelling angels (“grap on wraðe / faum folmum”; he seized upon the evil ones, the guilty ones with his palms; lines 61b–2a), the ensuing battle of good and evil occurs exclusively in the affective realm:

The rebelling angels are thoughtless, and their loss appears as an inability to use or enjoy their might. God’s response, framed in the conventional poetic terms of mod exalted or extinguished in battle, similarly appears primarily in its piling on of further affects: He himself becomes angry and extinguishes his enemies’ courage and humiliates their pride, permanently taking not only the power and realms they had flaunted but their capacity for joy and peace. With their pride goes their beauty as well (“wlite gewemmed”; countenance defiled; line 71a). The poem’s emphasis on proper affect suggests that this is the final and most salient characteristic of damnation: not confinement in hell but an everlasting inability to experience the affective bliss for which they had been created.

With the expulsion of the rebel angels, the narrative returns to the renewed paradise of heaven:

Once the disobedient angels have gone, peace, virtue, and love for God thrive without hindrance. Those angels remaining are defined by joy. Without transition, the poem juxtaposes this peace in heaven with the wroht (enmity), oht (calamity), and orlegnið (war) wrought by those who are gone, and then, suddenly, introduces a new and uninhabited paradise: an extensive land “wuldorspedum welig” (rich in glorious prosperity; line 87a); “gifum growende” (flourishing with gifts; line 88a); “beorht and geblædfæst” (bright and glorious; line 89a). This paradise contrasts strongly with the teeming heavens, and represents several of the peculiarities of Old English poetic paradise: This paradise is set wide, widely, upon the earth and is buendra leas, without inhabitants (lines 87–9). But there is more, too: While Barrar argues that the mansions of the New Testament heaven are replaced with fields in the Old English, this verse does the opposite, introducing swegltorhtan seld (heaven-bright homes) where there had been none in the Vulgate (line 95a).⁵³

A single half-line and a few houses hardly suffice to uproot a pastoral paradise. But the swegltorhtan seld are part of a larger pattern in which the features of the rural, natural landscape are spoken of and conceived in the terms of human artifice. Paradise is a setl (residence; line 86b) and in lines 135 and 146, God does not create trees but builds with timber and heofontimber (heavenly timber).⁵⁴ The terms of cultivation and construction hardly diminish this painted paradise. Quite on the contrary, nature is artifice and artifice is the unfallen, unoccupied pastoral landscape of creation. This stage is set before it is fully explained, as the poem returns to the biblical account of creation starting with the division of the heavens and the earth. Genesis A explains that this world compensates for the loss of the rebelling angels. In their place we have an as-yet innocent humanity:

The affective state of humanity in paradise recalls the affects characterizing the earlier description of heaven: Despite or because of their lack of experience, Adam and Eve’s default disposition is to burn with love. This affective state grounds further delight in creation: God in turn is bliðheort (glad at heart; line 192), and commands them “[b]rucað blæddaga” (enjoy glorious days; line 200). We should note that brucan means several things: to enjoy but also to use or benefit from a thing.⁵⁵ A clear distinction between use and enjoyment is offered in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, which explains:

For Augustine, God and those things which lead to God are the things to be enjoyed exclusively; those things which are used are properly used only to that end. In the unfallen world, however, use already implies enjoyment and vice versa. To distinguish whether one meaning or another operates in the Old English Genesis misses the point, yet the fact that such distinctions blur in the vernacular heightens the sense that true enjoyment involves that which corresponds to divine goodness. Nor are the humans the only ones who enjoy the paradise, as

God’s looking upon creation serves no further purpose; his work has already been completed. Yet God, and the poem, pause upon the image of paradise, filled with gifts both for use and enjoyment, and upon the earth that is gefrætwod (adorned) with fruits for its inhabitants (line 215a). Furthermore, we are told: “nalles wolcnu ða giet / ofer rumne grund | regnas bæron, / wann mid winde, | hwæðre wæstmum stod / folde gefrætwod” (not at all then did the heavens bear rains over the wide ground, dark with wind, however the earth stood adorned with fruits; lines 212b–15a). The unfallen state of paradise appears inherently opposed to the idea of the merely instrumental, as no darkness or wind or rain must come for the fruits to adorn the land, but rather water springs up from the earth that thereby adorns itself. The land gleams with gold and gymcynn (gold and precious stones; line 226a). This land is not merely an unbounded rural landscape but, again, a work of divine artifice that both exhibits itself as luxurious creation, using Old English poetic motifs of treasure, and enfolds any idea of its use value into its value as an object of delight.

Although the loss of this earthly paradise occurs in the Genesis B portion, when Genesis A resumes after the fall narrative, it remains concerned with these gifts and the affect associated with the beholding of them:

The story of Adam’s shame of course comes straight from the Vulgate, but the affective experience of shame shows how his body is to be read as lost. Adam’s attempt to conceal himself arises from his knowledge that he should be ashamed; he anticipates contempt and concurs with contempt for himself. Ironically, as God points out to him, his attempt at concealment only reveals his state more glaringly: He had never received shame (sceond) from God before but only gifts. The fact that Adam anticipates – and thereby already possesses – shame, shows that something has gone horribly wrong. Adam knows grief, hides shame, and perceives sorrow, and these affective and perceptual experiences in concert reveal what he tries so desperately to hide: himself. Adam realizes that he cannot hide himself; the probably erroneous scribal doubling eall in “Ic eom eall eall nacod” (I am all all naked; line 871b) seems fortuitously appropriate in context. In any event, the punishment of Adam, Eve, and the serpent all emphasize the physicality of the revelation of their guilt insofar as each punishment involves their bodies: The serpent must crawl on its stomach, the woman endure pain in childbirth, and the man be turned naked away from paradise. Yet intrinsic to these bodily punishments are affective punishments: God commands Eve to “Wend þe from wynne!” (Remove yourself from joy!; line 919a) as if joy is a place that she might physically depart, and Adam’s curse likewise involves not only his body but the space it inhabits, as he must seek a homeland far from paradise, a “wynleasran wic” (more joyless dwelling) that he shall turn to “on wræc” (in misery) as a “nacod niedwædla, | neorxnawanges / dugeðum bedæled” (naked beggar, deprived of the honors of paradise; lines 928–30a). If affect should be understood as bodily experience, here in Genesis A it is intrinsic to embodied experience of the physical landscape. The loss of paradise occasions for humanity, as it did for the fallen angels, the loss of the joy for which they had been made, and which had been made for them in the form of their proper paradise. Many of these themes naturally pervade the Genesis B portion, although with the interjection of this material at line 235, the narrative begins anew in a different style.⁵⁸

The interjected story of the fall in Genesis B includes two fall narratives, beginning with the rebellion of Lucifer and other angels before the creation of the earth. Specifically in the Genesis B account, Lucifer learns after being damned about humanity, about Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman, who enjoy a paradise created specifically for them. At this stage of the narrative, earth is a paradise, and is for humanity what it is for the medieval writers described by Minnis: a space of speculation and possibility, free of the constraints of the fallen world.⁵⁹ Lucifer, of course, sends his messenger, a Tempter, to try to convince Adam to disobey God so that Adam will lose paradise just as Lucifer had. Eventually, the Tempter convinces Eve to disobey by eating the forbidden fruit, she convinces Adam, and Genesis B ends as the two of them are forced to leave paradise and make their way in the world.

Against the backdrop of the angels’ rebellion and loss of paradise, humanity in Genesis B is defined from the outset by its felt engagement with creation: Humans are to use and enjoy (niotan) all but the forbidden tree (line 235), and “they kn[o]w nothing of sorrows to be mourned” (“nyston sorga wiht/ to begrornianne”; lines 242b–3a). But the audience, it should be understood, must know of the sorrows to be mourned. This is how Old English poetry works, at times to the chagrin of modern readers who encounter it. When the Beowulf poet tells us that Hrothgar and Hrothulf sit peacefully together because the Scyldings did not perform deceit at that time, the poem doesn’t need to tell its audience exactly how things are going to go badly; it assumes they already know.⁶⁰ When the Deor poet offers an allusive account of Weland’s suffering but reminds us that it passed over, the poem doesn’t need to tell its audience exactly how those stories went; it assumes they already know. And when Genesis B tells us that humanity in Paradise didn’t know yet about the sorrow that was to befall them, it assumes its audience does know this sorrow, and that they know it is their sorrow too. And just as the formulaic verses that comprise this poetry accumulate associations through repeated use in different contexts, these allusions and foreshadowings bring their common stock of associations, too.

The narrative of Genesis B is not, of course, one of unending joy in Paradise. Immediately as the Genesis B portion opens, the strongest and most beautiful of created beings, Lucifer, begins having other thoughts:

These lines, part of a section marked by hypermetric verses, depict Lucifer’s fate before his fall as, again, one defined by joy and the sensory experience of beauty above all else. The word wæstm, referring to fruit, produce, or increase, and here meaning something akin to “stature,”⁶¹ echoes the wæstm that has just been forbidden to humanity nineteen lines earlier. The term links Lucifer’s fate with the humans’ – both that his fortunes while yet unfallen are a gift from God like the fruits of paradise, and that his high status and beauty, like the forbidden fruit, will become a source of temptation to take more than has been given. The anaphoric use of sceolde (should) in the final three half-lines steadily sets out the fitting response to such gifts, and yet, simultaneously, the repetition of the preterite subjunctive (that is, should, not did) reminds us thrice that of course it will not be so. Genesis B portrays the fall of the angels and of humanity, featuring formal heroic speeches and the proud angel’s rebellion. Much like the rebellion depicted in Genesis A, this one features more of the affects than the effects of the celestial beings: terms such as gebolgen (enraged), hete (hatred), gram (furious) fly fast (lines 297–302), and the angels are deceived by gal, a lust or pride paired with oferhygd (presumption), feelings that arise from their perception of their state that are contrasted with the appropriate delights that properly characterize heaven (lines 327b–34a).

And yet throughout Genesis B, beauty, above all, marks the created works of God, including the chief of angels, Lucifer himself. Both Lucifer and Adam, at this early point in the text, are presented as stunning works of God’s artifice, yet their affective responses to perceiving this are very different. As his fall approaches, Lucifer’s created beauty reveals the folly and tragedy of his spurning his creator:

These lines set Lucifer’s status and splendor against his provocation of the creator who gave him both, defining him by his beauty and failure in concert. And when his rebellion inevitably and utterly fails, Satan’s great sorrow exists in inverse relation to Adam’s joy in his creation and in the paradise created for him:

Again, the biblical Genesis does not mention the fall of Lucifer at all, but the structure of this poem allows his reaction to God’s creation to contrast with Adam’s. The Adam of Genesis B, while unfallen, rightly takes joy as a corporeal being in a material, constructed paradise – this affective perception defines his experience. Adam’s particular delight in material creation becomes more acute as the poem progresses, and plays its role in humanity’s fall. But there are two important lessons to learn: that beauty and delight are good and the loss of either is truly loss, and that beauty and joy apprehended wrongly may lead to the loss of both. How then may the poem cultivate joy in beauty that exceeds human perception, when the very possibility of that joy requires proper apprehension?

This is the question that drives the fraught portrayal of artifice and delight through the rest of Genesis B. And just as Lucifer fixates upon the objects of Adam’s delight, so, too, must we. In the affective associations borne by beautiful objects, the earliest English devotional poetry shows us the necessity and the danger of carefully cultivating devotional feelings. As the poem approaches the scene of humanity’s fall, its attention gradually turns from the objects that produce delight and grief to the subjects who perceive them. The extent to which this fixation on perception arises from the Old Saxon original cannot be measured, since only twenty-six lines of the Old Saxon fragments coincide with the extant Genesis B. These lines present a speech of Adam’s, just after the fall, that tantalizingly depicts the horrors of hell as present and palpable:

In any event, the Old English poem’s meditation on perception begins at the outset, as the devil who comes to earth appears ready in his adornments but bears a hidden spirit that belies his appearance. The scenes of temptation that follow make much of appearances. In a marked departure from the biblical story, the devil appears to Adam first, and then to Eve in turn, using different rhetoric in each attempt. Glenn M. Davis has written about the differences in these temptations, and how Eve’s temptation focuses on the promise of greater vision; Davis’s argument importantly counters those in which Eve succumbs to vanity rather than sensory illusion.⁶³ Yet I would further argue that the devil’s appeals wrongly direct a right habit of delight in created beauty and that this is not unique to the temptation of Eve. There are three scenes of temptation in Genesis B and all share this characteristic of misdirecting proper delight in perception of beauty. When the Tempter comes to Adam first, among the many promises he makes to him is that Adam will be made þy wlitegra (thereby more beautiful) if he eats the forbidden fruit (line 420a). Adam never denies the desirability of beauty – on the contrary, his bold reply asserts what he knows of God’s good artifice, and what he knows of God’s angels:

Adam has seen angels before, and knows that the Tempter does not look like them. He asserts, in essence, that his perception of God’s good artifice gives him a spiritual knowledge.

By the time the serpent approaches Eve, he has learned from his initial rejection and thereby anticipates possible objections, and so asserts preemptively, almost comically, “ne eom ic deofle gelic”! – I am not like a devil (line 587b). But the Tempter does more to head off Eve’s skepticism – he claims that Adam has refused greater vision, an enhanced perception from God that would increase humanity’s apprehension of God’s goodness:

The Tempter offers not abstract wisdom but an expanded perception described in specifically physical terms. The promised light and sight will also bring power: We have just seen Adam’s superiority demonstrated in his greater sight and interpretation of what he sees; now Eve believes that greater perception will increase her stature in turn. And, just as Adam had understood that his perception of God’s creation would give him understanding, Eve under the influence of the Tempter witnesses a vision of beauty that seems to bolster the devil’s words:

The immediate consequence of this altered perception appears to be a deeper capacity to experience beauty. This is the power and the danger of beauty in Genesis B. Beauty is itself a good, and Eve appears to receive at this moment a deeper capacity to experience beauty, and to delight therein. Her practical application of this ability – to draw information and conclusions from her observation of the material world – is one that the poem has just lauded. Yet even as Eve’s desire grows, even as she comes to flirt with the idea of gaining mastery over her lord, Eve, unlike Adam, appears to be deceived by what the Tempter does to her perception alone:

Eve trusts, essentially, just what Adam did, and what the Tempter lacks in his encounter with Adam teaches him how to deceive Eve. He has learned to appeal to her desire to obey God, to suggest Adam’s disobedience as a threat, and to play upon the experience of created beauty by which she and Adam had been able to understand their world. Interestingly the word for “to see” in this section is wlitan, recalling the noun wlite, meaning beauty or appearance. Does this suggest an inappropriate enchantment with appearance on her part? Does ær (previously) indicate a past deception or an ongoing one? The perception of God’s beautiful work, and the delight that results therefrom, is good. But Eve has mistaken the context of her delight under the Tempter’s illusion. Her perception becomes her problem.⁶⁴ Adam has, in every instance, apprehended correctly: He has no reason to err. Yet when the Tempter interferes with Eve’s apprehension and the objects of perception, her discernment fails, and her delight misleads her.

Eve’s temptation of Adam involves attesting to changes in sense perception similar to those that the Tempter had promised to her,⁶⁵ and from this moment in the poem, Adam and Eve’s moral and affective responses to material they perceive are far from straightforward. Her vision seems in some way a result of illusions implanted by the serpent, and the poem seems to exculpate the fallen Eve as she approaches Adam:

The notion that Eve in her temptation of Adam bears a loyal spirit when she has so recently committed the first disloyal act in human history – believing through the Tempter that Adam rather than she has unwittingly disobeyed God – departs strikingly from the biblical account and clashes with later scenes in Genesis B in which the hearma swa fela come as punishment for disobedience.⁶⁶ At the same time that Genesis B seems to lighten Eve’s guilt, it mourns her fall and what seems to be the loss of her prelapsarian beauty:

The term ungelic bears quite a bit of weight here, although its precise meaning remains obscure. If beauty, and the fruits of the earth, are different now, if she is told so explicitly, does she then unwittingly offer to Adam the fruit that has caused her to fall? Or perhaps the beauty of creation has now become ungelic, strange to her, because they represent unfallen creation as she never will again?

Yet while seeming to lighten Eve’s guilt, Genesis B mourns and confirms the tragedy of her fall by means of the loss of her delightful beauty. Her beauty before her fall, like that of Lucifer, is a work of God’s artifice, rightly producing joy in its being and, in its loss, grief. In some way her relation to beauty has changed and is changing, and the poem continues to mourn this with her as she lingers in paradise in her fallen state, and as she approaches Adam, innocently or otherwise:

She is clearly gone, although secretly, perhaps to herself as well as to Adam. As the poem approaches Adam with her it exalts her beauty, if for the last time. Her beauty moreover explicitly arises from her being the handgeweorc (handwork) of God, a work of divine artifice. Though there is little overt comment on the affective states of any of the players at this moment, the poem offers a poignant cryptic comment on the state of her heart:

The unblessed apple, fruit of the death tree, forbidden by God, lies both in her hand and in her heart as she offers it to Adam. In early medieval English literature, as Lockett demonstrates, mind–body dualism is not a default assumption as it is in Early Modern thought, and in fact an individual’s affect and mental states are understood not only to be embodied but to be located in the chest cavity, susceptible to things like heat and pressure.⁶⁷ However literally we are meant to understand the work of the apple on Eve’s heart at this moment, what are we to make of her mental state? While physically the apple she has ingested would indeed be within her, that it specifically lies at her heart suggests how her psychological orientation toward God has already changed. That the apple lies sum in her heart and sum in her hand suggests both the action of offering the apple to Adam and the affective state that accompanies the actions physically undertaken. She offers the apple to Adam with the words, “Adam, frea min, | þis ofet is swa swete, / blið on breostum” (Adam, my lord, this fruit is so sweet, cheerful in the breast; Genesis B, lines 655–6a).⁶⁸ This is the only time that anything is called swete (sweet) in the entirety of both Genesis A and B. The apple is not only sweet but blið (joyful), and curiously both the sweetness and the joyfulness seem to lie in the breast, so the sweetness becomes not only an expression of taste but of affect. Blið (joyful) is a significant lexical choice. While in much of the extant literature it refers to joy fairly straightforwardly, in the entirety of the Genesis poem, it only appears as a free morpheme twice in 2,936 lines, both times within a 100-line span, both times in the formula bliðe on breostum (joyful in the breast; lines 654a, 750a).⁶⁹ In one instance, this half-line is spoken by Eve tempting Adam and in the other, by a devil to another devil. In neither case does the object of delight produce real joy, but rather each occasions or compounds death and animosity with God, and each suggests the possibility of perverse or devious enjoyment. By contrast, wyn, another word for joy, occurs regularly throughout the poem and most frequently within the story of creation and fall, without apparent devious connotations (Genesis lines 252, 364, 467, 666, 918, 925, 945, 1851, 1859). Only after this moment does the poem offer lines seeming to lessen Eve’s guilt, leaving a lingering sense of ambivalence over her intentions at the scene of temptation.

But a further change occurs in Eve’s perception soon after, accompanied by a profound affective shift:

The poem states Eve’s grief before the perception that causes it: that false light that had given her such a blið heart now sliding off, the verb scriðan evoking a movement as if that of a serpent. Her perception of the false light creeping off is identical with her perception of having been deceived, and this apprehension is profoundly affective: “forþam him higesorga/ burnon on breostum” (therefore deep sorrow burned in their breasts; lines 776b–7a). Strikingly this affective response to their damaged state occupies the same bodily position as had the affective delight which seemed surety of their safety before, and likewise results from the physical perception of sight. Sight becomes both the means of deception and of realization of that deception, as well as one of the vehicles for their resulting suffering. As Adam exclaims, “Swa me nu hreowan mæg / æfre to aldre | þæt ic þe minum eagum geseah” (Thus may it grieve me now, and forever after, that I saw you with my eyes; lines 819b–20). Ironically, among the gifts and signs that God has given him is the wlitesciene wif (beautiful woman) whose very beauty supports the integrity of God’s authority over the Tempter’s, and yet which now, he seems to suggest, has led him astray (line 526). Adam’s reliance on sight allowed him to resist the Tempter but not, apparently, his wife; likewise, while Eve’s sight revealed the truth of her fallenness, it had helped lead her to fall in the first place. While the affective perception that accompanies these visions offers some key to their interpretation, the wrong kind of affective apprehension possesses deceptive power. But lest we think affects are to be rejected in favor of intellectual discernment alone, the poem here reminds us that joy is precisely the good end that humanity has lost. The poem emphasizes the importance of discernment while relying on its audience’s possessing the capacity to discern – indeed, the audience must already possess knowledge of the story, and how they might feel about it, for its more allusive notions of delight to work on them in the first place.

The Painting of Paradise

Human language inevitably fails to represent what lies beyond the senses by which humans experience the world. However, beyond the limitations of human language, there are particular dangers for Old English poets depicting paradise, fabricating the furnishings of heaven, because the inadequacy of language and of their particular poetic conventions bears both aesthetic and devotional significance. This problem differs from that of analogous depictions of hell, as we will see in Chapter 3: Images of hell seem to be only more terrifying in their assurances that reality far exceeds them.

But even the earliest English poetic depictions of paradise insist upon joy. They further assume aesthetic delight in the world, and particularly in cultivated or artificially wrought objects. And so we are offered, in the Genesis poems, The Phoenix, and elsewhere, a sophisticated negotiation between the problems and potential of the aesthetic, understood both as apprehension of artistry and of perception more broadly. As we have seen, the earliest English poetic paradise is rural and spacious but not merely so – it is a landscape that testifies to the mastery of its maker, conveyed through images themselves composed of finely wrought, conventional language. The poems that contain them also portray further making of song and art as a fitting response to the powerful affects inspired by the perception of divine artifice. Beauty and affective apprehension of created beauty are essential, and potentially dangerous. Medieval devotional poetry, even in this early period, must explore the potential danger of aesthetic delight: the overindulgence in luxury, the enchantment of sweetness, the ability of the devil to assume a pleasing shape. Yet here again, affect becomes a guide for discerning between proper delight and overindulgence – because medieval authors consider that delight and lasting joy accompany beauty only when the real nature of the objects of perception may be piously, properly understood. In this way, devotional understanding is not simply the goal of paradise poetry but the aesthetic means of cultivating an affective taste for the divine. Such devotion cultivates taste for the ineffable, the inaccessible that must be desired, even though it exists beyond the human capacity for either sense or speech.