Exile In The Seafarer

Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles completely illustrate Odysseus’s journey home after The Trojan War. Separated into twenty-four different books, the poem describes the hardships Odysseus faces and how he overcomes obstacles. Though this poem is composed for listeners and may seem incomprehensible, Homer includes a plethora of literary devices to help audiences better understand, follow, and enjoy the context of The Odyssey. Throughout this poem instances of epic simile, foreshadowing, epithet, and xenia are included to help the poem flow.

Anglo-Saxon literature often expressed concepts of survival, battle, exile, male dominance in society, and loyalty to the lord. These aspects are strongly represented in both “The Wanderer” and “The Wife’s Lament”. Both elegies deliver themes of self-exile and the mourning of lost companions. Ideas of longing and alienation are present in these two Anglo-Saxon poems through use of figurative language, structure, point of view, comparison, and various other literary techniques.

The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife’s Lament all contains faith verses fate. The three poems are very similar and very different. The three poems ranging from a lonely man, to a lost soldier, to a wife’s bedrail. The medieval poems show hurt, confusion, and loneliness.

The Odyssey is filled with emotion and adventure. Homer’s ability to show and give the reader a visual of each and every scene gives the story its unbelievable significance. To all the people who read his work there is something to be captured within every sentence, each one different in its own, unique way. Through tales of courage and defeat, friendship and love this book tells of all the values within the life of a single, solitary man, and his journey to attain what is true and dear to him. And this journey is known to all of us as The Odyssey. The Odyssey is a test of human devotion and trust through the gods, the mortals, and the obstacles through which they venture. No matter where they go or what they do, humans are tested for

Exile is when a person is isolated from his/her native country or home. Sometimes it's considered to be a way of alienating someone but sometimes it could be considered to be enriching. In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley John the Savage experiences exile as both alienating and enriching. He was born on the Savage Reservation and his mother Linda was rejected and criticized because of her sexual freedom. Due to his mother’s isolation John did not feel as though he was accepted by other savages in the reservation. As an adolescent he was refused to participate in the Native American ritual, a ritual that would allow him to enter the adult Indian society. He asks, “why wouldn’t they let me be the sacrifice?”(pg.116). He asks this question not understanding why his own people were denying him. After his rejection he goes into the wilderness and tortures himself in order to enter adulthood. This is one of many ways his society kept him from being a normal kid.

When isolated from society, loneliness becomes a part of you. In the poems, The Wife’s Lament translated by Ann Stanford and The Seafarer translated by Burton Raffel, are two similar and different poems. The characters in these poems handle their exiles in different ways. The way the two characters reflect from their exile is based off Anglo-Saxon values and beliefs. These poems compare and contrast the exile between men and women.

Both the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘1001 Nights’ feature male protagonists who traverse the seas, and the concepts and themes of men seafaring is common throughout most canonical texts. For example, the allusion of Odysseus’ difficult journey is made when a minor male character in Apuleius’ ‘The Golden Ass’ describes his seafaring adventures as being ‘positively Ulyssian’ (‘Ulyssian’ thus being a reference the Roman naming of Odysseus) (pg 29). Furthermore, both texts share themes, such as: seafaring, the supernatural, trials and tribulations, tradition, belief systems, and the geographical setting and pride in the protagonist’s home city play a key role to the overarching plots of the texts in the sense of the protagonist’s endurance and motivation to both leave and return home. Likewise, the supernatural is used to further the plot of both texts.

The Odyssey is one of the oldest well known stories to date, and it is believed to be written around 2000 years ago. Its age is not the most fascinating fact though, the epic poem is comprised of 12,000 lines of death-defying, adventurous tales that are separated into different episodes. The Character traits of the might Odysseus, the structure of The Odyssey, the diction within the epic poem will be explained in this essay.

The comitatus “stressed the loyalty of a thane to his chieftain and treated exile and outlawry as the most tragic lots that could befall one. This secular sense of loss is keen in The Wanderer.”6 Not only is the loss of a lord evident in “The Wanderer,” but in “The Seafarer” and “The Wife’s Lament” as well.

In this essay, I will examine popular Greek ideas concerning fate and their relationship to characters in Homer's Odyssey.

Isolation from society can evoke a deep loneliness and self-reflection. The poem "The Wife's Lament" from the Exeter Book expresses the desolation of exile. The dominant theme is the contrast of a happy past and a bleak present of isolation. The anonymous author of "The Wife's Lament" uses setting, tone, and conflict to develop the theme of great loss. He/she augments a situation in which meditation on life's past joys is the only redemption in a life sentenced to confinement. “The Wife’s Lament” is an excellent example of nostalgia, resentment of the present, and hopelessness about the future.

      The characters in the Old English poem Beowulf certainly delighted in the seas. This essay seeks to compare their attitude toward the sea with that expressed in another Old English poem, The Seafarer.

In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, main character Mariam is forced into exile after a horrific set of experiences. After her mother’s suicide, she is removed from her home and is later arranged to marry a random man she never met before. Before her departure, Mariam lived in a “kolba,” a small hut on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. With no other place to go, she disapprovingly lives with her father for a short period of time before being shipped off to her new husband. Her encounter with exile is almost unbearable, yet she endures and grows into a hardworking and respectable woman. For Mariam, exile is both alienating and enriching; it illuminates how withstanding life’s challenges and learning to overcome them with love will ultimately be beneficial in the end, no matter what happens.

It’s easy to tell that the ocean is a mysterious and isolating place from all of the tragic tales we hear from sailors both real and fictional. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and an anonymous author’s “The Seafarer” are quite similar in that they both revolve around said tragic tales told by sailors. However, there seem to be more commonalities between their themes, tones, and messages rather than their seaward-bound settings. But before we can discuss these similar settings and deeper themes, we have to tackle their origins.

In the medieval period, the Old English elegies use unnamed speakers that offer similar descriptions of devastated landscapes and immense personal hardships. However, where the unknown authors’ of the Old English elegies often present smilier descriptions and themes across their respective works, they do not present similar opinions on larger concerns like religion and the role of community. This is a concept that is interwoven into the framework of the Old English elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”. By comparing and contrasting these two works, this paper will argue that the unnamed narrators’ vivid descriptions of landscapes, circumstances surrounding their exile, and climactic perspectives on the earthly community function solely