The Dream of the Rood: A Few Psychoanalytic Reflections

Each fall, on both sides of the Atlantic, thousands of undergraduates commence their specialization in English literature by perusing an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rood. I want in the following psychoanalytic discussion to indicate (1) a major source of this old poem's strength, or, to use the customary terminology, a major source of its poetical “tension,” its poetical “ambiguity”; and (2) the manner in which the poem gives expression to what has become a perennial conflict in Western civilization. Strange as it may seem at first glance, this “dream” is vitally connected to crucial moral issues in our own day.

II.

Here is a summary of the poem:¹ A narrator asks us to “listen” to the “best of dreams.” At “midnight,” when “men and their voices are at rest,” he beholds “a most rare tree reaching high aloft.” This “tree,” which begins to emerge in the form of a cross, is “wound in light,” covered with “gems,” and stared upon by many “angels.” Wonderful, we are told, is the “triumph-tree,” particularly to the narrator who describes himself as “stained with sin” and “wounded with wrongdoing.” Declaring, “this was surely no felon's gallows,” he is suddenly startled and frightened to see the object bleeding from its right side. Oddly, it begins to alter and realter its shape: one moment it is “drenched in blood” and the next “adorned with treasure.” Our narrator lies there “troubled,” until the “tree” begins to speak. Employing the first person, it tells a tale of violence and woe: I was “Hewn down” at the “edge of the wood.” I was “taken from my stump.” Men “carried me on their