The island is filled with the sounds of the sea. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, the metaphor of the ship was used as a token of movement and of composition itself, the narrative becoming a vessel which had to be driven across the face of the deep. The ship also became the frail form of the human being tossed on the ocean of life, with faith and hope and charity as its three anchors. King Alfred continually resorted to nautical imagery, and his own experience of the sea in peace and in war informs his writing; he declares, for example, that ‘a good steersman, by the raging of the sea, is aware of a great wind ere it come. He bids furl the sail and sometimes lower the mast, and let go the cables, and by making fast before the foul wind he takes measures against the storm.’ He uses many compound variants for the sea—egorstream, hronmere, laguflod, fifelstream, merestream—as if its reality could only be understood as shifting and multitudinous. It rises, too, in other Anglo-Saxon prose: in Byrhtferth’s invocation of ‘the salt sea-strand’, for example, and in Werferth’s description of ‘the person who approaches land in a frail ship’. In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we read of ‘the tossing waves, the gannet’s bath, the tumult of waters, the homeland of the whale’, this fervent litany calling up the spirit of the deep. The poetry of the sea is deeply implicated in the Anglo-Saxon imagination with its ‘sealte saestreamas ond swanrade’, the salt sea-currents which are the swans’ path, running into all subsequent English verse. The sea is also ‘calde waeter’ with lines which vary ‘the emphasis on the “depths” to “space” to “terror”’ suggesting the English fear of the ocean. In Anglo-Saxon poetry it is as if the island of Britain were truly the home or harbour. This in turn has informed the pastoral dream of England as a calm and tranquil haven. The exile or wanderer, in contrast, in customarily depicted as surrounded by ‘the sea booming—the ice-cold wave’.
