“The Order of the World”: an odd lyric from the Exeter Book, it seems to unite poetic composition, offering to initiate a neophyte into its mysteries, and in doing so, explores the creation principles of the universe. Its vision of creation is more spiritual than religious, missing many things these sorts of accounts often feature (the days of creation for instance, as you can see in Genesis A).
My translation identifies an enabling pun: a common epithet for God in OE poetry is “Meotud.” Usually this is just rendered as “God” and no one ever thinks twice about it. Occasionally you will come across something a bit better, like Bradley’s “Ordaining Lord.” That’s a start: the word seems to be related to the OE verb “metan” and would suggest a connection to measuring (and Bosworth see a connection to pre-Christian terms for deity). I always used “Measurer.” A synonym for “to measure” is “to mete” as in “mete out justice”. Next step: a “meter” as in “poetic meter” is a count that measures the space of speech and its organization. So why not make it the name for the divine in a poem about the godly nature of poetry? The “Meter”. The “Maker”. Poetry is a pulse of nature, uniting all its creatures, and so forth…
Your site is so exciting. Thank you for loving the word! I live in Exeter not far from the word hoards you translate. What humour and wit! Here’s a little scribble after reading your Order of The World.
Girl Scup : Will it be enough?
You want soul to shine forth
into syllables unselved
where thought is stripped?
Will you,
Let word untell you,
swell you into sweet silence
unnerve the heavy heart?
A vowel may be pregnant
enough to bear you
into saying something…
Your tongue fired
staccatos
can’t catch
the spirit field…
Beyond….
Fire flicking in the forked
tongue Eve saw,
the red sayer
of snake slipped forth
into the conflagration
of singer and unsaid.
Better be wombed in silence
little word slut, even wounded,
than to strut all your somethings
into sayables. Those syllables
will soon be dead.
Better to sit in the field
of shining, quiet.
Than to be woefully
wordy.
Love slips through
the virgin consonants
the very O O O of glory
my muse mouth,
worm hole of mystery.
lucky maker, me
girling into the Music
of the ordinary.
This is glorious, friend — thank you for sharing with us!
I love the connectiond you make between words that o er time have perhaps slid away from their original usage and from eachother so that we are mostly unconscious of the links. Finding the links makes each word mor powerful than it is in isolation.
I use this in my own poetry. And just as extra, my oldest favourite poem is The dream of the Rood. It, along with my writing and reading about land, will influence my poem The Dream of the Land.
Now that I have discovered your site, I will follow you.
Nita Nicholson
PS My webiste needs updating
Hello, thank you for the kind words. I’m so happy that my work & passion has been helpful to you. That sense of “significant excess” is key to translation & theory more generally. I wish you all the luck & enjoyment of your endeavors & I would be glad to talk to you further about the “Dream of the Rood” as it relates to your ideas.