"Caedmon" by Denise Levertov

Caedmon

All others talked as if

talk were a dance.

Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

would break the gliding ring.

Early I learned to

hunch myself

close by the door:

then when the talk began

I’d wipe my

mouth and wend

unnoticed back to the barn

to be with the warm beasts,

dumb among body sounds

of the simple ones.

I’d see by a twist

of lit rush the motes

of gold moving

from shadow to shadow

slow in the wake

of deep untroubled sighs.

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:   

but the cows as before

were calm, and nothing was burning,

                nothing but I, as that hand of fire   

touched my lips and scorched my tongue   

and pulled my voice

                                 into the ring of the dance.

Source of the text – Denise Levertov, Breathing the Water.  New York: New Directions, 1987.

TJB: Farmboy, interrupted. In short, Anglo-Saxonish half-lines, the poem dramatizes not the hymn itself but the moment of cowherd becoming poet.