Aldhelm, Saint: Rhythmi

These rhythmical poems, printed in Rudolf Ehwald’s edition of Aldhelm (c. 639–709), abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop of Sherborne, are written in short accentual lines of eight syllables with heavy rhyme and alliteration. The first is addressed to a reader who had pressed the poet to fulfil a promise: he tells how, on a journey through Devon and Cornwall, he was caught one winter night by a violent storm, and describes the battle of the winds, the shaking of the earth and uprooted oaks.

Other rhythmical poems in the group, some of which Ehwald assigned to Aldhelm’s pupil Æthilwald, treat pilgrimage and the gifts of grace, ending with travellers who return home bearing spiritual riches for the threshing floor of souls. The poems are among the earliest Anglo-Latin rhythmical verse and show the dense, ornamental vocabulary for which Aldhelm was admired, a style that influenced later Anglo-Saxon Latin writing.