"As if talk were a dance"

According to Bede, Caedmon, a herdsman at a monastery, would leave the monks celebrating with feasting and song to join the animals, because he had no talent with songs. There, one night, he had a dream or a vision, in which he was given the gift of poetry and told to sing principium creaturarum, "the beginning of created things." He is the earliest-known English poet.

Caedmon

Denise Levertov

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.