Structural Patterns in the Old English Advent Lyrics

Abstract

When we talk about the lyric in Old English literature, we are immediately confronted with problems of definition. Some critics have denied that the lyric as a form existed in Old English at all. Others have included virtually all the short poems in the broad category of lyric. The truth is that although most of the shorter poems in Old English do fall into broadly distinguishable types, they do not fit neatly into any of the categories which later periods have distinguished and given latinate form-names. For instance, the term elegy, defined and exemplified in our minds by certain classical poems and applied with some justice to poems like Lycidas and In Memoriam, does not truly characterize any of the socalled Old English elegies. In the case of the lyric, it is very difficult for anyone in the 19th and 20th centuries to define the term without having the romantic lyric in the back of his mind, and the definition he is likely to invent applies rather badly to the seventeenth century devotional poem or the sixteenth century sonnet, even less well to the medieval lyric and not at all, to the various short poems in Old English. I shall not here try to produce a universal definition, but it seems clear to me that the lyric cry andthe spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings are concepts which had best be