From "The Dream of the Rood"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

The Dream of the Rood is one of the Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative verse. Rood is from the Old English word rōd 'pole', or more specifically 'crucifix'. Preserved in the 10th-century Vercelli Book, the poem may be as old as the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross, and is considered as one of the oldest works of Old English literature.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Friday, April 2, 2021.
0:06.4	Today is Good Friday, and so today I wanted to share a poem that is keeping with that theme.
0:12.7	Many of you will be in and out of church today, certainly in and out of church this weekend.
0:16.8	And so given the seriousness of this day, in terms of holy days, in terms of holidays, it seems right to read a good Friday poem, particularly after yesterday's more jovial poem.
0:30.1	And what I'm going to read today is from a poem called The Dream of the Rude.
0:34.2	It's a very early English poem. In fact, it's written in old English,
0:39.6	and I'm going to be reading a translation of it. And I'm actually going to be reading a selection of it
0:44.2	that Plow quarterly posted. You can go to plow.com, P-L-O-U-G-H, because they posted three poems for Good Friday.
0:51.7	One was by Christina Rosetti and one by John Maysfield. And the one
0:55.4	that I'm going to read today is The Dream of the Rude, and we don't know who the author was.
1:00.9	Some people think it may have been a lost poem of Cadman, who, according to Beade's
1:06.9	ecclesiastical history of the English people was the first Christian English poet.
1:13.3	Cademan lived from 657 to 684, and while that hasn't necessarily been confirmed, there's
1:20.4	certainly a number of scholars who think that that could have been him. A number of other names
1:24.2	are out there, though none as famous as Cademan. And the version that I'm going to read today is translated by Richard Hammer,
1:31.2	and that was released in 1970.
1:33.5	It's a little long, so if I have time, I'll read it again,
1:36.0	but I want to just dive right into it,
1:37.3	and hopefully this will be a contemplative poem for your Good Friday.
1:42.1	The Rude Cross of Christ speaks. It was long past. I still remember it
1:51.1	that I was cut down at the copses end, moved from my route. Strong enemies there took me,
1:58.8	told me to hold all off to their criminals, made me a spectacle.
	...

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