Heaven’s Harbour
The lives of men are like voyages across stormy seas, but we no longer have to sail them as if they were uncharted waters.
?800
Anglo-Saxon Britain 410-1066
The lives of men are like voyages across stormy seas, but we no longer have to sail them as if they were uncharted waters.
?800
Anglo-Saxon Britain 410-1066
Christ is a long narrative poem by Cynewulf, a poet writing in Old English at the turn of the ninth century, about seventy years after the death of St Bede. In the following extract, he likens human life to the tossing of ships on stormy seas, and the Christian gospel as a chart to bring our ‘sea-steeds’ safely to heaven’s harbour.
NOW is it as though we fared in ships out upon the ocean, over the waters cold, and urged our barks, our sea-steeds, across the broad flood. A perilous stream it is, endless waves and wind-swept seas, on which we toss throughout this fleeting world, over the fathomless reaches. Hard was our life ere we sailed to land over the stormy main.
Then came our help: God’s Spirit-son guided us to the haven of safety, and gave us grace to see, over the vessel’s side, where with firm-set anchor we should moor our sea-steeds, those ocean-stallions old. O let us fix our hope in that holy haven above, which the Lord celestial prepared for us when He ascended into the heavens!*
* Compare the little verse that St Godric of Finchale (1070-1170), a man who had sailed many seas, used to sing to St Nicholas:
O SAINT Nicholas, God’s delight,
Build us a harbour, fair and bright;
Be at the crib, be at the bier,
To bring us, Nicholas, safely there!
See also Some Prayers of St Godric.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.