At some point along the end of the tenth century, a poem entitled “The Wanderer” was written by an anonymous writer in Old English, an elegy which preserved a tale of loneliness and of sorrow, of a man who has lost all that was dear to him, and wanders as he tries to forget his past and move on but is tainted by the ghost of what once was. In 2023, over a thousand years apart, an Irish singer-songwriter named Hozier was able to capture the same essence of the poem in his song “All Things End”, which also explores the ideas of mourning what is over and feeling lost. Indeed, this shows that the poetic representation in elegies is able to prove that human essence and experience remain the same, despite the passage of time.
This similarity between the two works is easily detected after a close reading of their contents, since they both touch upon a very specific feeling: sorrow. In the chorus of “All Things End”, this can be observed:
When people say that something is forever
Either way, it ends
And all things end
All that we intend is scrawled in sand
It slips right through our hand
In this excerpt, Hozier is able to capture the ephemerality of humanity, and just how all experiences eventually come to an end. This same idea can also be seen in a passage of the poem “The Wanderer”:
Here wealth is fleeting, here friend is fleeting,
here family is fleeting, here humankind is fleeting.
All this resting-place Earth shall become empty.
Another moment of resemblance, where the aspect of loneliness is emphasised in Hozier’s song: “I have never known silence like the one fallen here”, in comparison to “The Wanderer”’s lament:
I must lament my cares; not one remains alive
To whom I could utter the thoughts in my heart,
Tell him my sorrows.
In this sense, the similarities of theme and of elegiac nature become clear, as does the importance of the two works to the contemporary reader, and precisely because Hozier did not get direct inspiration from the Old English poem, one can argue that these are matters pertaining to existential questions inherent to the human condition itself that surpass time and sustain themselves through the eras and all historical contexts.
In conclusion, it becomes clear after analysing the examples that one of the reasons why Old English poetry maintains its relevance is exactly that, although written at a displaced time in relation to the that of the modern reader, it still contains the elements of a human outlook that is the same one that roams the Earth to this day. By making this connection between two works, one that is seemingly lost in time and another that is more contemporary, the value of the first is reassured and the second can stake its claim as an artistic piece that is able to apprehend the magnanimity of the human experience through aesthetic experience.