from the Old English 'The Dream of the Rood'.

Inanimate things speak in Old English poetry, often in ways that are ambigious and thought provoking.

in this case, the Cross manages to convey the painful ambiguity of its response. It wants to crush the enemies of Christ. it wants to bend and break. Instead it does its duty, stands fast and allows the eager hero to mount his gallows.

The poem begins with a speaker anouncing that he will tell us ‘The dream of dreams!’. He tells us how he dreamt about the Rood, the Cross on which Christ was crucified. He describes how the Cross appears, and his descripiton acts as a fame or at least an introduction before the Cross itself begins to speak. The passage I’m reading contains the last four lines of the intial dream description and then the opening portion of the Rood’s story of itself.

This is Michael Alexander’s translation from ‘The Earliest English Poems’ published by Penguin Classics, which has recently been reissued as ‘The First Poems in English’. You can hear the whole poem read in Old English by Micheal Drout at http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/category/dream-of-the-rood/

P.S

The modern title is ambigious. The Poem is not the dream belonging to the Rood, it’s the dream about the Rood.