Narrative on `The Dream of the Rood`

As the for the first time known ambitiousness poem in side of meat literature, The inspiration of the Rood has stood as bingle of the most celebrated and profound works in verse roughly the world. along with a penetrating, mystical vision of Christian ghostlikeity and illume Biblical allusion, the poem offers a diverse and inspired form and style to match its powerful theme and images. The Dream of the Rood is best dumb as an imaginative re-enactment of a private penitential experience This critically acclaimed, hammy Old English poem is the first dream-vision in English, and its most allow features are a startling phthisis up of language, powerful prosopopoeia, and striking imagery. (Butcher)Along with religious imagery which overtly signals the spiritual and penitential themes of the poem, The Dream of the crucifix extends truly original diction and meter to propel its impact. The basic bilgewater of the poem may have been drawn from earlier sources, poems which uti lized the same theme an older poem describing the crucifixion of Jesus which may peradventure have been written by Caedmon or one of his school, and which Cynewulf took up and worked at in his own fashion, adding to it where and how he pleased, and changing its mode of presentation &8212 qualification it, for instance into a dream, and adding the personification of the Tree. (Brooke 438)Using the theme of Christs crucifixion allowed the poet to soar into inventiuve language and word-choice, to establish poetry which addressed the spiritual and religious impulses of the Anglo Saxon world More explicitly in what is by chance the most famous of the Anglo-Saxon Christian poems, The Dream of the Rood, the poet represents the Crucifixion as a physically active and heroic act. (Crafton 214)This basic story is two straightforward and mystical the speaker tells of his swefna cyst, best of dreams, in which he sees the crossover of the crucifixion, alter nately bejeweled and bloody, in t he sky. The cross then speaks, giving its own first person account of the Passion of Christ, and encouraging the dreamer to spread the center of the cross to his contemporaries. (Dockray-Miller) In order to capture the luminous and exalted opinion of inspiration and religious intoxication which permeate the poem, the poet engaged in the use of language which is both striking and deeply connotative.In generating the narrative of the poem, the poet resorted to the use of gender-charged or gender-specific language, to personify and attribute qualitites to the elements of the poem which would enable its message to bulge powerfully.Particularly concerned with how language could be used to signal a status of power, the poet of The Dream of the Rood used masculine- and feminine-coded language to signal a change in the status of power-figures. (Hawkins)Evidence of controlled and inspired diction is perspicuous from the poems opening lines the poet announces he will recount the swefna cy st, or best of dreams, the first-time reader thinks nothing of the phrase except that it signifies excellence in dreaming, perhaps however, on second and third passes through the poem, the reader becomes sensitive that this diction deserves close scrutiny the poet is establishing that both his narrators dream and the head in that dream are the best that is to say, they are ultimate truth. (Butcher).Likewise, the tree, depict first in the poems fourth line as syllicre tr?eow, an absolute use of the comparative syllicre, meaning a tree more than marvelous than any other tree. Syllic is a variation of the adjective seldlic, from which our seldom comes. Thus, syllicre tr?eow can also be translated rarest tree. Immediately, the poet has established the exceptional nature of his subject. (Butcher). plant life CitedBrooke, Stopford A. The History of Early English Literature Being the History of English Poetry from Its Beginnings to the Accession of King Aelfred. New York Macmillan, 189 2.Crafton, John Michael. 11 expansive and Heroic Poetry. A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature. Ed. Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert doubting Thomas Lambdin. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 2002. 210-229.Dockray-Miller, Mary. The Feminized Cross of The Dream of the Rood.. Philological Quarterly 76.1 (1997) 1+.Hawkins, Emma B. Gender, linguistic communication and Power in The Dream of the Rood. Women and Language 18.2 (1995) 33+.Butcher, Carmen Acevedo. The Dream of the Rood and Its Unique, Penitential Language 1+www.carmenbutcher.com 2-5-07.