But it shades off, as the intention becomes more fanciful or pictorial, and the object less to denote and more to describe or recall the vision of things, into the 'poetic class': the principal means by which colour was given to Old English verse. In this class, sometimes called by the Icelandic name 'kenning' (description), the compound offers a partial and often imaginative or fanciful description of a thing, and the poets may use it instead of the normal 'name'. In these cases, even where the 'kenning' is far from fresh and has become the common property of verse-makers, the substitution of the mere name in translation is obviously as a rule unjust. For the kenning flashes a picture before us, often the more clear and bright for its brevity, instead of unrolling it in a simile.
I have called this the poetic class, because there is a poetic intention in their making. But compounds of this kind are not confined to verse: not even those which arc poetic and fanciful. We find 'kennings' in ordinary language, though they have then as a rule become trite in the process of becoming familiar. They may be no longer analysed, even when their form has not actually become obscured by wear. We need not be led astray in our valuation of the living compounds of poetry by such current 'kennings' as the prose lichama == body, or hlafweard = master. It is true that lichama the 'raiment of flesh', discardable, distinct from the sawol or 'soul' to which it was intricately fitted, became an ordinary word for 'body', and in its later form licuma revealed the evaporation of feeling for its analysis and full meaning. It is true that hlaf-weard 'bread-keeper' is seldom found in this clear form, and usually appeared as hlaford (whence our wholly obscured lord), having become among the English the ordinary word for 'lord' or 'master', often with no reference to the bounty of the patriarch. But this emptying of significance is not true even of the most hackneyed of the 'kennings' of the poets. It is not true of swanrad 200, beadoleoma 1523, woruldcandel 1965, goldwine 1171, banhus 2508, and the host of similar devices in Old English verse.[9] If not fresh, in the sense of being struck out then and there where we first meet them, they are fresh and alive in preserving a significance and feeling as full, or nearly as full, as when they were first devised. Though lic-hama had faded into licuma, though there is now 'nothing new under the sun', we need not think that ban-hus meant merely 'body', or such a stock phrase as hæleð under heofenum 52 merely 'men'.
He who in those days said and who heard flæschama 'flesh-raiment', ban-hus 'bone-house', hreðer-loca 'heart-prison', thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. There it seethed and struggled in the wylmas, the boiling surges beloved of the old poets, until its passion was released and it fled away on ellor-sið, a journey to other places 'which none can report with truth, not lords in their halls nor mighty men beneath the sky' (50-52). The poet who spoke these words saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth[10] beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas[11] and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life,[12] until the hour of fate[13] when all things should perish, leoht and lif samod. But he did not say all this fully or explicitly. And therein lies the unrecapturable magic of ancient English verse for those who have ears to hear: profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harp-strings sharply plucked.
9
On