From: Jon & Anne Weidler <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu Mar 6, 2003  11:17:23  PM America/Chicago
To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: bloody violence and resignation in The Wanderer (Was Re:
metaphysics in "The Wanderer")


My.  I did not expect this kind of vitriolic explosion -- Tim asked a
question about Buddhism and the Wanderer that I tried, in my own
limited way, to address.  Perhaps others noticed: I approached the
issue in good faith, and his response was entirely inappropriate to the
tone of my original comment.

Tim: I apologize for addressing you, and I assure you it will not
happen again.  If the other members of the list are as offended by my
offhand comments as youare, I trust they'll inform me.  In the event
that few share your opinion, this spectacle of spleen has been nothing
but an isolated misfortune, and I'll do my best not to let it ruin my
day.

Jon

On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 12:07  PM, Tim Romano wrote:

> Jon,
> I'd prefer to discuss this poem (or any poem) with you when you weren't
> relying upon vague recollections. The Wanderer depicts the
> psychological
> trauma of a bloody massacre within the framework of Boethian philosophy
> (his Consolation of Philosophy was the most widely read book in
> medieval
> Europe).  As you'll recall, Boethius, by order of Emperor Theoderic,
> the
> Arian Barbarian, had his skull slowly crushed by iron bands which were
> made
> to close around his head ever more tightly. [As I'll recall: there's
> nothing I
> love more than a bookworm namechecking to harvest credibility]
> 'Mutability'
> is not the mot juste.  [Then the word "laene" is, see  ll. 108-109.
> The poet is
> the one who wields it, placing it in contrast with the heaven of the
> Father
> in line 115, which "faestnung stondeth".  Being loaned versus standing
> fast;
> that was the entirety of the contrast I wanted to make; a place of
> suffering
> where all that is loved can be stolen versus a place of permanence
> where all
> that was loved is remembered.  My respondent had to blow this all out
> of
> proportion, servicing some act in an interior drama.  Fantastic new
> technologies we use, telescoping human grasp while shrinking all sense
> of proportion, all usefulness of effort.]
>
> The poet of The Wanderer, btw, *is* the "original poet"; they're one
> and
> the same; The Wanderer is not an oral-lay but a tightly constrained
> *literary* work that uses the formalities of chiasm and numerical
> compositional constraint as a sort of checksum to guard against
> unfaithful
> transmission in an age when poems were copied out by hand or memorized.
> [Having been there yourself, I'll take your word for it.] The
> deciding factor in determining whether a work from this period is
> 'literate' as distinct from and 'oral' is not whether pen and ink were
> used
> during its composition, and not whether pen and ink were used in its
> transmission, and not whether oral-formulae are employed, but the fact
> that
> the poem as it stands is a "perfected" work that does not admit of any
> alteration, loss, or accumulation of new detail without violence to its
> form. [Who said anything about literate, one way or another?  Did I
> ever
> say the Wanderer wasn't a good poem?  Every scholar knows that debates
> exist around the provenance of very old texts, and there's no need
> acting
> self-righteous about the suggestion that more than one intelligent mind
> worked this poem over before it found its way to Sweet's Anglo-Saxon
> Reader and onto the world wide web.  Big deal.  Shakespeare and the
> Bible
> aren't immune from textual skepticism, so save your breath about the
> single
> author of the Wanderer.  It hardly matters as much as your
> gesticulations
> insist.]  There was, in fact, a bit of doggerel insinuated into the
> manuscript
> by some windbag, probably a 10th c. Benedictine, and those few lines of
> platitude stand out as would an Ogden Nash couplet in "Exile's Letter".
>