Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/196

180 he comes in sections; while Deor is artistically an individual, if not a definite man who tells us as matter of the witness-box his own emotion and thought. It is true that all the material of Deor’s song is continental; but Anglo-Saxon poets were quite capable of making such a compact and convincing “dramatic lyric” out of the old stuff. They were accustomed to “ego” verses: one thinks of the Riddles, and, still better, of The Dream of the Rood. The Wanderer is another case, not unlike this of Deor, though of much later origin; both poems are artistically sincere and sympathetic. Deor, old as it is, has the modern lyric note of annexing wide human interests and a sweep of history in order to illustrate the singer’s proper fate; and this conception on the part of an English poet would blend admirably with the tradition of some minstrel in the ancestral home, who took courage from his own stock of lays and fronted his evil hour with a smile. That, however, is an impression. There are facts which must be considered; and these facts seem at first to allow another inference.

The form of Deor’s Song is peculiar. It has a refrain-line which marks off the verses into sections or paragraphs, so that one is tempted to call it a poem in stanzas. Traces of the same structure are noted in the Rune-Lay, and naturally also in the Psalms; but the mere recurrence of a refrain does not suffice to form the regular stanza. In part of the Gnomic Verses, or Maxims, of the Exeter manuscript, however, and in what used to be called the first of the Riddles, there is an attempt to make those regular stanzas which are so familiar in Old Norse; and the result must be noted here, in order to reach a right judgment about