The balance between joy and pain in Beowulf The poet Richard Wilbur expresses in his poem Beowulf one of the many pains expressed by the original Beowulf poem: “ Gifts such as are the hero's hard reward...He placed these things under his parting sail, and mourned that he could share them with no son” (Wilbur 67). The hero's lament of not having an heir is but one of many dozens of sorrows in this poetic classic, which is balanced with numerous joys expressed on every other page. This essay expresses nothing more than a selection of joys and sorrows among the almost innumerable ones existing in the poem. Beowulf begins and ends with the painful occasion of a death, that of the Danish king Scyld Scefing in the opening lines and that of our hero in the closing lines. . This fact is important in some critics' classification of the poem as an elegy rather than an epic: “It is a heroic-elegaic poem; and in a certain sense all its first 3,136 lines are a prelude to a dirge: [Then the people of the Geats prepared no small pyre on the earth]: one of the most moving ever written” (Tolkien 38). Hrothgar, Scyld's great-grandson, introduces the first full measure of joy in the poem (1) by being a king “beloved by his people; and (2) with the construction of a huge and splendid hall called Heorot, where he can "share among young and old all that God had given him..." In the hall "every new day" loud happy laughter could be heard in the hall, the sound of the harp, the melodious singing, the clear singing of the scop.” And in the hall there was an even deeper spiritual joy as the listeners learned “how the Almighty had created the earth, this bright and shining plain that the waters surround”. will be the object of hostility from various kingdoms, mourning - all this grief can perhaps be balanced by: They said that he was, of the kings of this world, the kindest to his men, the most courteous man, the best with its people and the most eager for fame. This famous and enduring poem is therefore seen as a balance of joys and sorrows from beginning to end. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chickering, Howell D.. Beowulf A Bilingual edition. New York: Anchor Books, 1977. Tolkien, JRR. "Beowulf: Monsters and Critics." In TheBeowulf Poet, edited by Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. Wilbur, Richard. "Beowulf." In TheBeowulf Poet, edited by Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.