When God Gives You a Voice

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom,

the might of the Creator, and his thought,
the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders
the Eternal Lord established in the beginning.
He first created for the sons of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator,
then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind,
the Eternal Lord, afterwards made,
the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

From Wikipedia:

Caedmon (IPA: [kaedmɒn]) is the earliest English poet whose name is known. An Anglo-Saxon herdsman attached to the double monastery of Streonaeshalch (Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of St. Hilda (657–681), he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but supposedly learned to compose one night in the course of a dream. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and inspirational religious poet.

Caedmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of only three for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived.[1] His story is related in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People") by St. Bede who wrote, "There was in the Monastery of this Abbess a certain brother particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who was wont to make religious verses, so that whatever was interpreted to him out of scripture, he soon after put the same into poetical expressions of much sweetness and humility in English, which was his native language. By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world, and to aspire to heaven."

Caedmon's only known surviving work is Caedmon's Hymn, the nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of God he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language.

Bede's account

The sole source of original information about Caedmon's life and work is Bede's Historia ecclesiastica.[2] According to Bede, Caedmon was a lay brother who worked as a herdsman at the monastery Streonaeshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey). One evening, while the monks were feasting, singing, and playing a harp, Caedmon left early to sleep with the animals because he knew no songs. While asleep, he had a dream in which "someone" (quidem) approached him and asked him to sing principium creaturarum, "the beginning of created things." After first refusing to sing, Caedmon subsequently produced a short eulogistic poem praising God as the creator of heaven and earth.

Upon awakening the next morning, Caedmon remembered everything he had sung and added additional lines to his poem. He told his foreman about his dream and gift and was taken immediately to see the abbess. The abbess and her counsellors asked Caedmon about his vision and, satisfied that it was a gift from God, gave him a new commission, this time for a poem based on “a passage of sacred history or doctrine”, by way of a test. When Caedmon returned the next morning with the requested poem, he was ordered to take monastic vows. The abbess ordered her scholars to teach Caedmon sacred history and doctrine, which after a night of thought, Bede records, Caedmon would turn into the most beautiful verse. According to Bede, Caedmon was responsible for a large oeuvre of splendid vernacular poetic texts on a variety of Christian topics.

After a long and zealously pious life, Caedmon died like a saint: receiving a premonition of death, he asked to be moved to the abbey’s hospice for the terminally ill where, having gathered his friends around him, he expired just before nocturns.