WORKS OF CYNEWULF.  The only signed poems of Cynewulf are The Christ, Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles, and Elene.  Unsigned poems attributed to him or his school are Andreas, the Phoenix, the Dream of the Rood, the Descent into Hell, Guthlac, the Wanderer, and some of the Riddles.  The last are simply literary conundrums in which some well-known object, like the bow or drinking horn, is described in poetic language, and the hearer must guess the name.  Some of them, like “The Swan"[33] and “The Storm Spirit,” are unusually beautiful.

Of all these works the most characteristic is undoubtedly The Christ, a didactic poem in three parts:  the first celebrating the Nativity; the second, the Ascension; and the third, “Doomsday,” telling the torments of the wicked and the unending joy of the redeemed.  Cynewulf takes his subject-matter partly from the Church liturgy, but more largely from the homilies of Gregory the Great.  The whole is well woven together, and contains some hymns of great beauty and many passages of intense dramatic force.  Throughout the poem a deep love for Christ and a reverence for the Virgin Mary are manifest.  More than any other poem in any language, The Christ reflects the spirit of early Latin Christianity.

Here is a fragment comparing life to a sea voyage,—­a comparison which occurs sooner or later to every thoughtful person, and which finds perfect expression in Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.”

    Now ’tis most like as if we fare in ships
    On the ocean flood, over the water cold,
    Driving our vessels through the spacious seas
    With horses of the deep.  A perilous way is this
    Of boundless waves, and there are stormy seas
    On which we toss here in this (reeling) world
    O’er the deep paths.  Ours was a sorry plight
    Until at last we sailed unto the land,
    Over the troubled main.  Help came to us
    That brought us to the haven of salvation,
    God’s Spirit-Son, and granted grace to us
    That we might know e’en from the vessel’s deck
    Where we must bind with anchorage secure
    Our ocean steeds, old stallions of the waves.

In the two epic poems of Andreas and Elene Cynewulf (if he be the author) reaches the very summit of his poetical art. Andreas, an unsigned poem, records the story of St. Andrew, who crosses the sea to rescue his comrade St. Matthew from the cannibals.  A young ship-master who sails the boat turns out to be Christ in disguise, Matthew is set free, and the savages are converted by a miracle.[34] It is a spirited poem, full of rush and incident, and the descriptions of the sea are the best in Anglo-Saxon poetry.