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.
[4] Both personal sin and collective guilt (scholars have compared the narrator's stance to that of the Peterborough Chronicler) are of concern.
[7] On that same page are marginal notes listing and glossing Middle English characters and their names, a list also found in McClean 123, which preserves a full version of the Poema; whether this is a gloss for the scribe or the reader is not clear.
[11] 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.
[2] The first modern critical study and edition (which used six manuscripts) was Hermann Lewin's 1881 Das mittelenglische Poema morale.