RUIN

LUKE MCMULLAN

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Ruin
by Luke McMullan
Copyright 2017

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

without the publishers written permission, except for brief
quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-285-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934575

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BlazeVOX
Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge graciously the permission

of McGillQueens University Press to print parts of the
lexicon and the manuscript transcription from Anne L.
Klincks The Old English Elegies (2001).

Other texts drawn on:

Rosemary Cramp, Grammar of Anglo-Saxon Ornament

(1991);
Henry Charles Englefield, Account of Antiquities
discovered at Bath 1790, Archaeologia 10 (1789);
George Sharf, Notes upon the Sculptures of a Temple
discovered at Bath, Archaeologia 36 (1855);
W. H. Knowles, The Roman Baths at Bath; with an
Account of the Excavations conducted during 1923,
Archaeologia 75 (1926);
Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-
Saxon Dictionary, based on the manuscript collections of the
late Joseph Bosworth (1898, 1921).

Thank you to BlazeVOX and Geoffrey Gatza.

Thank you to Asymptote and DATABLEED, who have

printed a couple of these translations previously.

Thank you to the SoundEye poetry festival, where the

residency in 2016 helped me hunt for traces in broken
seams.

I also wish to thank Sophie Seita, whose indomitable

encouragement was invaluable to the completion of this
book.

4
 Table of Contents

Of the composition of ground ..........................................................11

Antechamber ........................................................................................ 12
Wrtlic (line 1) ..................................................................................... 13
Wondrous this wallstone .................................................................. 14
Wealstan (line 1) .................................................................................. 15
Stone ....................................................................................................... 18
Wyrde (line 1) ....................................................................................... 19
More wreck ...........................................................................................22
Burgstede burston (line 2)................................................................. 23
Enta geweorc (line 2) .......................................................................... 25
Breach .................................................................................................... 26
Hringeat[?] (line 4) .............................................................................. 27
The storm screen is a time display ................................................ 30
Cnea (line 8) .......................................................................................... 31
Rghar ond readfah (line 10)........................................................... 33
church, and blackthorn-lichen. ................................................... 35
Steap geap redreas (line 11) ............................................................... 37
Barrel vault........................................................................................... 38
Lamrindum beag (line 17) ................................................................ 39
Heah horngestreon (line 22) ............................................................. 41
Extract from further correspondence on heah horngestreon: ......... 45
Till a globule fierce ............................................................................ 48
Mondreama full (line 23) .................................................................. 49
Fragment .............................................................................................. 50
Crungon walo wide cwoman woldagas | swylt eall fornom
(lines 2526) ..................................................................................... 51
Interlace ................................................................................................. 52
Teaforgeapa (line 30) ......................................................................... 55
Over the eastern portion there is much disturbed and
decayed concrete .......................................................................... 58
Beorgum (line 32) ............................................................................... 59
The reflection in the ring pools face............................................ 60
r a bau wron (line 40)........................................................... 61
t is cynelic ing (line 48) ............................................................. 63
The Ruin (Old English text) .......................................................... 64
Word Tables .........................................................................................67
RUIN
Introduction

The following are translations of an Old English (Anglo-

Saxon) poem traditionally called The Ruin.

The single copy of the manuscript, part of the Exeter

Book, was partially burnt in the Ashburnham House fire
of 1731.

Consensus is that the poem describes an Anglo-Saxons

encounter with the Roman ruins of Bath.

Some archaeological evidence corroborates this.

The ambition of this book is for a new kind of

translation: to dwell in this text as Francis Ponge did in
the pine woods.

All poems exist diaphanously, dispersed among

matrices of accumulated possible readings.

Readers must weigh the balance of probabilities these

choices mount up before proceeding or, better yet, hold
many points aloft.

I hope this book facilitates such suspensions.

Except where prohibitive, translations have been printed on

the left-hand page and notes in parallel on the right-hand
page.

9
Of the composition of ground

the ground opened

consisted
almost entirely
of the fragments
of ruined buildings

11
Antechamber

Redly this wall stains, as all things,

unbleeding the city. Rot
is the progress of finality. A giant
is anything we have not seen
in a long time. Nor will.
Nor will. A roof is not security
but staves off the return
to which we all must come back.
A tower is an eye; to see
is to stain. The finality
of a gate
eradicates distance. A gate,
absent, is an occasion for piety.
Everything is insinuated by ice.
Ice staves off the rot.
A battlement is a meant cut.
Destruction is implied by intent.
There is a point at which decay
will rapidly accelerate into collapse.
This fact is a catastrophe.
Is time sudden? Is a gate a tourniquet?
The earth inters what was intended from it.
The world is another cruelty.
Offspring make a chain, that is, more links.
When you look to go, look first.
The eye will often show intention
by the place it falls.

12
Wrtlic (line 1)

Old English (OE) wrt means jewel, ornament, and

work of art; it also means red. The lic suffix in OE is like
Modern English like. So the word is gem-like,
artwork-like, ornament-like, or some equivalent.
Anglo-Saxon jewellery was sophisticated (the Fuller
Brooch, for example)the wrtlic may be meant to
summon the fine and intricate craftwork associated with
it. In Beowulf, Grendels severed head hanging in Heorot,
is called wrtlic. The same bloodily ironical insinuation
is present in the first word of The Ruin. The wall-stone
is wrtlic; later on it is readfah (red-stained).

Does the poem know its place in the violent histories it

conjures? The wrtlic wall contains perhaps its future.

Redoubling the irony, we learn that the wall-stone is

wyrde gebrcon (broken by fate) at the end of the line.
What is broken by fate is also artfully made, arranged
by some strong agency. Creation implies destruction.

The process ending in the refinement of a jewel must

begin with a breaking of ground, hunting for traces in
broken seams, all faculties ablaze.

13
Wondrous this wallstone

Wondrous, this wallstone, on fates wheel broken,

boundaries bursted, and blighted the giants work
the roofs are all ruined, the towers ruinous,
of ring-gate bereft, and rime on the limestone.
Sharded the shelters are, sheared, all fallen,
undereaten by age. Earths clutches retain
the workers, outworn, foregone,
hard groundgrip. A hundred generations
of people withdrew. Onward this wall bade,
greygone and reddened, reign that reign followed,
upstanding through storms. Fell the steep spandrels:
the remains are yet heaped
clung
grim-ground
on it shone the bodies of heaven
artificial artefacts
tiles in a ring
The mind remembers, in mental abstraction,
the heedful in rings, the heartproud festooned,
that wire-fastened wall, wondrously bound.
Brilliant the buildings were, and the bath-halls
manifold:
high arches in hordes and the great hosts commotion
in the meading-halls many, full of mans gladness.
Until the great wheel annulled it.
Widely fell the war-dead, onward came plague days,
silence plundered it all, the sword-steady men.
Their war bastions were waste sites,
the boundaries blighted, and the builders all died,
hosts in their earth house. So these houses decline,
and the red-arched shingles shed down.
The roofs framed beams descend to rest,
fragmented in mounds where, long ago, battle men,

14
Wealstan (line 1)

Compound of weal (wall) and stan (stone).

Does the compound mean a stone part of a wall, or a

stone that used to be part of a walla piece of it already
wyrde gebrcon, broken [off] by fate? Is a stone that used
to be part of a wall still a wallstone, or just a stone? In
the temporality of the line, in which one word succeeds
another, we imagine at first that the wealstan retains
integrity because we have no reason to consider it
broken by the first four words of the poem alone,
artfully made is this wallstone.

It is not until the immediately following broken by fate

that we must revise our understanding of wealstan to
include the possibility that it may no longer be joined to
the wall.

Both the original and my translation play on the poets

simultaneous vision of the past and present of the
ruined city. Both times exist in the one place; I have tried
to capture that epochal multitude in my treatment of the
manuscript, capturing its three-dimension production in
my three-dimension, philological reception of it.

Some Anglo-Saxon buildings used repurposed Roman

stone or brick. They preferred in general not to settle in
these ruins, perhaps thinking them haunted. In The
Anathemata, David Jones revives the remoteness of the
Anglo-Saxon world from the post-Roman universe they
came to inhabit:

15
gladdened and gold-glimmering, gleamingly fettered,
were solemn and wine-blushed. Their war deckings
shone.
And they looked on sapphires, on silver, on soil-wrought
gems,
on fortune, on riches, the rarest stones,
on this whole bright burgh, its broad domain,
when the stone houses stood, gushing hot streams,
welling wide. The wall all engirdled
in its bright bosom, there where the baths were,
heating the spirit. That was havenly.
They they let flow
over the hard stone the hot streams.
and
until the hot ring-pool
there where the baths were,
then is
that is a kingly thing
how it burgh

16
 You dont want to raise an Icenian
Ventas Brettisc ghost,
Hell latin-runes tellan in his horror-coat
standing
IAM REDIT ROMA
his lifted palm his VERBUM is.
(Jones, Anathemata, Faber (1952), p. 112).

Our thinking about the temporality of the line must be

informed by its original oral context. For the first
hearers, the manuscript was not available for rereading
as it is for us. Particles of past and present merge like the
notes of a remembered tune.

17
Stone

This new faceted stone

the gods would unfasten

buffers overflow
a memory adjacent myth
we refuse to know

the horizon does not change

unstacks itself
and the cloud are of iron woven
some new firmament in my ken

the earth cannot be made

to rhyme with the sky
only equalise
slowly
which we learn from hailing

what has gone by

and goes still
retrieving plenty
forswears ascesis
clutching

and death is how we feed the ground

fanatic citations
marmoreal accretions
serve to repeat
incessant departure

18
Wyrde (line 1)

Wyrd means fate, destiny, event, occurrence. A word for

the uncontrollable. Derived from the (reconstructed)
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *wert-, meaning to
turn, wyrd is also related to the Latin vertere, to turn, as
well as the OE verb weoran, to become. Thus in the
alliterative translation I have translated wyrd seo swie
(lit. fate the powerful) as The Great Wheel like the
Rota Fortunae.

The turning root of wyrd resonates with the figures of

rings and circles, bends and arches that fill this poem:
the city is fated to turn in rings.

19
the lesser faceted rock
greater or lesser
a long time withstood
storms and the weather
surging with moss and cochineal
in dynasties

an arch is a statement of gravity

anarchy is the true freedom
something always lives on
which is tragic
enduring the course of sublation

tenacious tectonics
the sun shines upon
or an updraft as old
as the clay crusts

which tend to the circular

darting of the
blackbird in the gardens nest
or floral crown

you are impotent

even in the course of change
spared unrequited surplus
a mean edge
to these hedgerows
concealing a gift
which means poison

20