The Cambridge Old English Reader

Even as he lay dying at Jarrow in 735, the Venerable Bede (see p. 105) was working and teaching, according to an account of the great scholar's last days given in a letter written by a pupil of his, Cuthbert. During this time, Bede, who was ‘well versed in our [i.e. English] poetry’, recited a poem ‘in our own language’ about death, for he was ‘skilled in the art of poetry in his own language’. Cuthbert gives us only a Latin paraphrase of the poem, but from at least the ninth century onwards copies of his letter were accompanied by an OE version too. More than thirty such copies survive, some made as late as the sixteenth century. A third of them (all apparently in manuscripts written on the Continent) have a text in the Northumbrian dialect; the rest are in a WS recension.

It would be nice to think that Bede actually composed the poem – now known universally as his ‘death song’ – just before he died, but there can be no proof that he did not simply recite one already known to him. The theme is a favourite of Christian writers, and one which Bede seems to have treated at length in a Latin poem, too – Judgement Day and the fate of the individual soul when it shall be called to account for its owner's conduct on earth.

This is not a poem of admonition – it is far too late for that; and there is no consolation on offer. The subject, the impersonal nǣnig (‘no one’), is placed in an emphatic position at the head of line 1b, and it turns out of course to means everyone. The levelling process encompasses Bede, too, for these lines avow a greater (and simpler) wisdom than that of even the wisest of earthly men. There is no resolution in the structure of the poem. It consists of a single sentence which moves inexorably from ‘before …’ in the first line to ‘after …’ in the last. The metaphor of an ‘enforced journey’ at the start gives way to an ominous ‘death-day’ at the close, and the subjunctive mood of the final verb (weorþe, 5), contrasting with the earlier indicative (wyrþeþ, 1), leaves a question mark over every individual's fate.