Dominant among the effects of some Old English meditative and elegiac poems is the paradox of simplicity. The premise might be advanced that the source of our wonder at, often mystification about, such poems as The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife's Lament is the fact that we are too far separated from the poetic consciousness which gave them being. But surely this would be a profitless premise to begin with, especially since our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture and society and learning is not uninformed. Yet our approach to these poems seems to be one of continual amazement and puzzlement, as the now numerous published critical, interpretive studies so well attest. And this is what I mean by the paradox: most of these poems are, in their essential statements, simple and direct; their themes of exile and transience, of resoluteness in the face of flux, of sorrow and hardship and deprivation are staple and often expressed in identical terms, such as the recurrent use of gnomic dicta and the catalogue of misfortunes or joys. Likewise, the vocabulary as vocabulary is static and conventional; the limited, insular hoard of commonplace simplices finds extension only in the native habits characteristic of bothpoetic and non-poetic composition, of affixation, derivation (e.g., anga, engu, langoð), and compounding, and the compounds themselves are more frequently than not transparent and, quite apart from their use in context, unexceptional.
The metaphorical conceptualization of sadness in the Anglo-Saxon elegies