麻豆社

Helen Mort explores the Old English word 'uhtceare', which meant anxiety at early morning, or 'dawn-care'.

In Old English 'uht' is the name for the last part of the night, the empty chilly hours just before the dawn, and so a particularly painful time for grief and loneliness. The word appears in the 10th century poem 'The Wife's Lament', and this programme looks for the causes of the affliction then and now.

Historian Janina Ramirez helps Helen try to imagine the world the speaker in 'The Wife's Lament' was living in, how exile from their Anglo-Saxon community seems to be feeding uhtceare, and how the poem presents many riddles. Medievalist Eleanor Parker suggests that the speaker, caught up in a warrior culture, has been left behind to grieve her husband, with words now her only form of protection.

Author and adventurer Maria Coffey finds resonances in the poem, and discusses with Helen whether the hours before dawn - without daytime distractions - can also strip back something and reveal the world as it is to us. Left behind to wait for news of a missing loved one - Maria's partner Joe Tasker disappeared on an expedition to Mount Everest in 1982 - an inescapable truth set in at 4am one night.

Helen's own poem, written during pre-dawn wakings, forms the spine of the programme, and she talks to poets Sharon Olds and Hannah Lowe about the cares that surface in the small hours of the night. Do these sleepless hours help or hinder their work? Are there are ever creative solutions to be found in the constant churning over of problems?