Eala Earendel: An Old English Remedy for Morning Sadness

O Radiant Dawn,
splendor of eternal light, sun of justice:
come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the
shadow of death.

(from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)

Today we reach the crisis of solstice. The days begin to grow longer, and we begin to discern what has been hidden for so long in the land of shade. Christ the Light comes in our hearts, and history herself dazzles with the dawn.

But not all of us know how to welcome the light of dawn. Indeed, many know its apparent bleakness. We “wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” (Hopkins), such that daylight simply illuminates an apparent waste full of nothing. Phillip Larkin expresses it well in Aubade, his morning song for the modern age:

In time the curtain edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there.

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now

Making all thoughts impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

(source: all poetry.com)

There are days when we wake up knowing the depression will be bad, paralyzing us as spectators of our own repeated failures; knowing the dull ache of being separated by death or circumstance from the one we love; knowing the infinite list of others we let down repeatedly. How do we know these things in the light of day? How do we know them in the light of Christ?

But the problem is not new. Whereas many cultures see night as the time of evil, Old English poetry conceived of the morning as the most terrifying hour, revealing with utmost clarity the extent of wrack and slaughter (whether literal or metaphorical) during the night. In the face of this, minds became morning-sick (morgenseoc), suffering from dawn-care (uhtcearu).

And it is in this context that we can read the extended Old English meditation on the O Oriens antiphon. Light is redeemed. The end of morning sadness begins. The Daystar rises in our hearts, not as the harsh light that reveals ruin, but as a comfort to mourners (geomrum to geoce). More than a mere statement, the Old English poem is a battle cry of the sort so beloved in Anglo-Saxon culture, spoken in impossible circumstances. The light of day does reveal our desperate plight. But there is another Light with whom we can live and die and rise again. It is this Light that reveals our world, not as a negative nothing, but as a beautiful “sunlit absence” (Heaney, Laird).  It will take time to see with Hopkins the precise nature of what and Who it is that “lights a lovely mile.” But for now we wait at the turning of the tide, the crisis of Advent, and we lift the cry of our hearts, Eala Earendel, O Oriens – O Christ, our Daystar, illumine not only our darkness, but even our light.