Old English prosody seems to run in two directions, one working with stress and alliteration; but one, esp. in the Biblical translations having a perceptible feel for church latin patterns of sentence structure -- an incantatory quality that depends on the relation of clause to clause. It seems to me that in the last 20 lines of his translation, E.P. is fighting against this current and cuts it off with his last line which is really part of an elaborate series of "nor" and "then" clauses all entertwined to what Bunting might have called a Lindisfarne Gospel effect. Pound breaks this series at its mid point with his last line and does not translate lines 98 b - 124 where the church diction becomes heavier. His translation then reflects a prejudice of his age which Ker shares, one that would disentangle the artificial Latin influence from the "genuine" germanic impulse-- Although there are different hands in the Seafarer manuscript--it is clearly Christian in its inception and motivation and seems to me to echo church diction often -- as do large sections of Beowulf. I think there may be effects of quantity in some passages: there is a lovely passage about "the hand that unbinds the frozen streams" in Beowulf--very much sounding like Ecclesiastes. I am not sure about numerology though. Anyone reading this far might be interested in my translation of The Seafarer, which appears in Puckerbrush Review (1992) and Fields (Light & Dust 1995). This working employs chance effects of a numerological order that were unpredicted at first but sustained by composition. http://www.dwc.edu/dept/hum/don.htm Don Wellman