The narrator, a wise, old man, reflects on his life and his many failures; the homily ends with a description of the
Last Judgment and the joys of heaven. sometimes as a homiletic narrative. It contains, in its longest version, 200 rhymed couplets. In fact, there is so much "metrical, lexical and scribal variation" that it seems there is no "correct" version: "each copy represents a reshaping within an established rhythmical and metrical structure." Though a seventeenth-century identification between the
Poema and
The Proverbs of Alfred by
Langbaine was proven erroneous (Langbaine was led astray because he had an expectation of finding the Alfredian proverbs in the manuscript known as
Bodleian Library Digby 4). There are, however, connections between the
Poema and the Proverbs: a couplet of the
Poema was written (in the same hand as the main text) in the margin of a manuscript containing the Proverbs (
Maidstone Museum A.13). At least one echo of the
Poema was noted in the
Ancrene Wisse. The twelfth-century
Ormulum has the same meter as the
Poema, but, in the estimation of at least one critic, the
Ormulum lacks the occasional vigor and "personal feeling" found in the
Poema.
Meter Following a Latin model, the
Poema employs a
septenary line, "a seven-foot line usually in trochaic rhythm"; according to
R. D. Fulk and others this is possibly the first example of that line in English. According to Joseph Malof, this Latin-derived meter in subsequent instances is transformed into the looser seven-stress line (proving the dominance in English of stress over syllable) that became the English
common metre, the standard line used in ballads. ==Manuscripts==