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"Surely," said the abbess, "this is a poem, most sweet, most true, most beautiful. It must be written down so that people in other places and in other times may hear it read and sung." So she called her clerk, who was a scholar, and bade him write the song, word for word, as it came from Caedmon's lips. And this he did. Such was the way in which the first true English poem was written.
And although Caedmon's songs had long been forgotten, at different times some parts of the Bible had been translated into English, so that the common people sometimes heard a Bible story. But an English Bible as a whole did not exist; and if to-day it is the commonest and cheapest book in all the land, it is to John Wyclif in the first place that we owe it.
We possess poems on the subjects which St Bede tells us that Caedmon wrote upon, but we cannot be sure that any of these are actually that poet's work. St Bede tells us that many others after him wrote noble songs, but he sets Caedmon's work above that of all those others as having been the product of a gift direct from God. In any case he must have influenced those who wrote later than he.
Hilary, as the first person in Gaul to write ecclesiastical and religious treatises in Latin, instead of the then more familiar Greek, felt this difficulty keenly; as our own Bede did when he tried to put Caedmon's Creation song into Latin.
Both of these poets deserve our love and our praise, as singers and inspirers of other singers, but we know much more about Caedmon's life than we know about his share in the poetry that has been attributed to him; that is the poetry which has gone under his name. That he did write much fine verse we know.
The spirit of Beowulf, softened and consecrated by religion, still persists in Anglo-Saxon thought and action. Caedmon. In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit.
And in these two monasteries Bede spent all the rest of his life. When Bede was eight years old Caedmon died. And although the little boy had never met the great, but humble poet, he must have heard of him, and it is from Bede's history that we learn all that we know of Caedmon. There is almost as little to tell of Bede's life as of Caedmon's.
Thus, the form that could most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the first to flourish. We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.
The poem "Genesis" is known to be the work of at least two people: part of it is a version of an old Saxon paraphrase of the Old Testament, and must have been written later than Caedmon's time. It is always interesting to know who it was that wrote work we care for, but it is a more important matter to possess the work itself.
The interesting collection, which goes by Caedmon's name in the Bodleian library, is a series of pieces on Scriptural subjects, with beautifully painted illustrations. Dunstan. * Rara Mathematica from inedited MSS., by J. O. Halliwell. Alcuin and Aldhelm were the chief Anglo-Latin poets. Some of Alcuin's letters are to be found in this collection. St.
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