Why You Should Read Old English Elegies When You Are Feeling Blue

On the catharsis of ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’

Photo by Conrad Ziebland on Unsplash

I enjoy reading about depression. I write this fully aware how jarring it might sound, knowing it might trigger some people, especially those who have fallen prey to the illness themselves. I write this because I’ve felt that way too and when I stumble on a paragraph in a book or a verse in a poem that could have been a mirror image of my life at the time, it feels like I’m finally being seen.

It’s what led me to seek out Wide Sargasso Sea after reading a reviewer’s brilliant essay on how Rhys’ book both shook and broke them and how they admired the work but were afraid to delve into it again due to its debilitating effect on their psyche. (I felt much the same but wouldn’t miss the ride!) There’s also Matt Haig’s brilliant Reasons to Stay Alive, the seminal memoir of the popular author (A Boy Called Christmas) that feels like a breath of fresh air. ‘You are allowed to feel what you feel’ is the heartening message I took from it. But it wasn’t until I embarked on my new pet peeve-reading as much of translated Old English poetry as I could find online- that I felt vindicated with regards to mental health representation in literature.

Sure, there are tons of bestsellers and classics that excavate issues of the mind with due caution and sport heroes that are oh so recognizably, beautifully broken, but there is something to the impersonal nature of these Old English poems that hits one hard. Maybe it’s the idea that people so remote from us and now long dead struggled with the same issues we do? Whatever it is, it has inspired me to share what I feel and think about the vulnerability on offer in the elegies that are The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament.

That very first work is a perfect read for the chilly winter season. It speaks of an unnamed narrator out on the sea in a boat, who laments the fact that he is not only completely alone but that the weather itself seems to have turned against him. The exile, who could be a lone sailor but also a wanderer or hermit, mentions hanging icicles, showers of hail, ice cold waves and chilled feet. (Anyone who has felt their toes freeze off while walking through a snow-drift might wince in sympathy.)

But most striking of all about The Seafarer is that the unknown stranger does not just mourn human company, he confesses that a change in his circumstances would not lift his mood either. ‘No friend could comfort my desolate heart’, it reads. People who have felt alienated from all joys or been in a deep funk for so long even happiness feels like a foray into a strange country would readily admit that once the gloom has taken over, there is no quick remedy. Even if your problems are solved, the pain does not go away and least of all, the memories. Jennifer Neville says as much in her essay Joyous play and bitter tears, the Riddles and the Elegies (in ‘Beowulf & Other Stories, A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures’), where she argues that an improvement in the weather, wine, song or the company of women, far from making the sailor ‘whole’ again would just worsen his depression.

The Wife’s Lament is even sadder. Focused on a woman doomed to live alone in a cave, far from her husband, whose love she has inexplicably lost, it’s a story with a bleak outlook. Where The Seafarer makes something of past joys, The Wife’s Lament is consumed by the harshness of life. Much is unclear, one theory supporting the view that the woman has been denied shelter by her husband’s relatives after he may or may not have gotten himself embroiled in a blood feud. Yet there is also the idea that the man she curses in the end is that very husband, who, in this case, could be the very reason for her enforced solitude. This is the interpretation I favour, as, in the bitterness of her speech, there is much emotional honesty in the grief-inspired words.

‘I feel in the wind that the man dearest to me detests me’

‘I was banished to this knoll knotted by woods to live in a den dug beneath an oak. Old is this earthen room, it eats at my heart’

In today’s modern time, we may not understand ideas such as absolute family honour, the joy of fighting alongside a blood brother or the inherent sinfulness of the world. But the disquiet caused by a loved one’s absence? The loss of a profound friendship? The reverberating echo of a past relationship? That will never fade out of time and anyone torn between the joys of the past and the suffering of the present would do well to read these poems.

Sources

Allard, J. and North, R. (2011) Beowulf and Other Stories: A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures. Routledge: Oxfordshire