Similarities Between The Seafarer And The Wife's Lament

Many people during the Anglo-Saxon time period believed that every citizen should live by the beliefs and moral lessons of their stories. Throughout this time in history, literature had a major role in the construction of the English language. Stories or poems told by the community were typically elegies. ‘An elegy is a poem of reflection that’s most commonly used to honor the dead.’ Considering the Anglo-Saxon traits of loneliness,sadness, and tragedy, “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” all exhibit typical characteristics of this influential time period through the How to Read Poetry notes.

The anonymous manuscript of The Wanderer the depicts ever cycling thoughts of an Anglo-Saxon man dug in his thoughts as he struggles with the loss of an epic hero. The Wanderer, a name fit for a someone confident, in search of something. However, this poem instead showcases a solitary man who dwells on his past rather than looking into the future. Referred to as “grasshopper,” – a title better fit for the elegy – which symbolizes the man’s clear loss of agency as he now lives sulking as instinct. The speaker explains his journey as a comparison to a journey or battle against the world but is rather a journey or battle against his own. The speaker describes a frigid wave bound escapade but is rather explaining his travels to illuminate his lone cold heart (emotionless). As clearly stated within the elegy, the speaker reminisces about old times because he wishes to have back his friends or someone to confide in. But as he already acknowledges, those are now all just memories that he must accept and let pass as these escapades with time become lessons of life. Though named The Wanderer, the elegy instead constructs the reoccurring cycle of unalterable emotion and loneliness as the speaker uses natural symbolism argue for fate but then realizing his life is determined by his relationship with God, not by friends or materialistic things.

Even though this exile is self imposed, he still feels the emotions Anglo Saxon feel if they were to be exiled. “The Seafarer” is an Anglo Saxon poem that revolves around exile because the seafarer has chosen to be at sea by himself. His exile is self imposed, he remembers his loss of home, and he believes that is stuck at sea. The seafarer shows characteristics of loneliness and talks about how he doesn’t have anybody to talk to anymore. He knows he is alone with the sea. He also believes he must walk the track of all the exiled before

The Seafarer is one of the many poems only recorded in the Exeter Book. With an unknown author, this particular poem conveys an act of religion. Separation from God was a theme used in this writing. The sea is seafarer's lord and his lifeline. While on the sea he is at his happiest. He is happy regardless

With these thoughts of his existence, the Seafarer suddenly starts to become conscious of his very own being, and realizes more about human nature. The speaker recalls of being pulled toward the suffering, being drawn toward his isolation that he is in. This could be a psychological aspect of the speaker in which his subconscious mind tries to punish the speaker for what he has done in the past. It could also be his mind interpreting the fact that if he goes through this suffering, he will find something greater. It is thus a paradox, then, when the seafarer says he is “seeking foreigners’ homes” (Raffel 19), because as he searches on and on, he is isolated more and more from the values that seek as a representation of these homes. The speaker introduces themes centric to the poem, which are stated as: “pride, greatness, boldness, youth, seriousness, and grace” (Raffel 19). The speaker then asserts that these virtuous themes will disappear one day, when one must rely on God’s judgment, and God’s mercy. With the implications of God, come the attributions the speaker asserts toward Fate, and the influence that Fate conjures in the lives of people. The speaker

"The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in the abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water." Chapter XXXIX

The woman in this poem grieves over the separation from her and her husband. Her husband left her because he was forced to leave for safety. She blames her husband’s kinsmen for dividing them and breaking her heart. Later in the poem, the woman meets another man. This man seemed to be everything the woman needed, until he was revealed as a criminal. Other men disliked her new lover, forcing the woman to live in a cave. Even though the woman from “The Wife’s Lament” moved on from her husband, she was deeply depressed. The woman grieved over her husband, mourning him. She was isolated from him, which was unbearable for her. Throughout the poem, she talks about the hardships of her life and Anglo-Saxon women lived

After reading "The Wife's Lament," I am left feeling as if the author's purpose in writing this poem was to bring about a voice for women and their feelings/struggles. According to our textbook, "Old English literature focuses largely on masculine and military concerns and lacks a concept of romantic love" (118). Rather than being told from a masculine point of view, a woman is the speaker in "The Wife's Lament," and the entire poem is based upon her feelings and what she is going through. The poem begins with, "I draw these words from my deep sadness, my sorrowful lot" ("The Wife's Lament" 1-2), which immediately tells us that this is a poem coming from a place of her feelings. Because of the time period that this poem was written in, and

Throughout the novel, the sea is a recurring motif that symbolizes glory, purity and illustrates the contrast between westernization and traditionalism through the land and sea.

First of all, The Seafarer is a great poem and has a very good message in it. The seafarer is about a man who is lost at sea and is contemplating all of his decisions up to this moment of him alone at sea. In this poem he talks about all his life accomplishments and how much money he has. However, he states at the end of the poem how money, wealth and power mean nothing in the afterlife. The only thing you should do is live a life pleasing to God and he will grant you the rest if it's his will.

To begin with, in the first poem, the Seafarer describes many characteristics that lead to being exiled. Comparing to the other Anglo Saxon poems, this one has the character with a self-chosen exile which makes him suffer and have a personal emotional struggle with himself. the Seafarer shows it stating “and yet my heart wanders away; / my soul roams with the sea / the whales home” (lines 58-60). The Seafarer explains in this quote that being exiled led him to always be away at sea. He had a constant fight with himself because he could never decide where he wanted to be, whether it’d be on land or at sea. the battle between his inner self and his desire to be out at sea is never truly understood. The Seafarer explains it as a solemn time during his life as he says “This tale is true; / and mine, it tells how the sea took me / swept me back and forth in sorrow and

What makes this text so important and remembered is that it provides the voice of a woman, which is extremely rare for this time. As said perfectly here,“Perhaps the major difference between The Wife’s Lament and the other two is that it offers us an early example of the female voice in poetry…”(Droxonian). The theme of relationships and their effects is explained in this line from The Wife’s Lament,“Full oft the lack of my lord seizes me cruelly here.”(32-33). The speaker of the poem, after being kicked out of her home and dumped in the woods, is crippled by the loss of her husband. The effect of relationships is also demonstrated after she stops referring to him with a loving tone in the last stanza. She switches her view from love to hate after realizing how much he must be hurting as well. The way relationships affect us can be pain in the heart and soul, or switching out feelings from love directly to

For the most part, the poem is sad and depressing and the reader easily sees what this man is going through and how terrible it must be for him to live without all the things many others take for granted everyday of their lives. The author of this poem, who has obviously been exiled, does an exquisite job of showing, maybe even teaching, to the reader how important the things are that you lose in life when exiled, no matter how rich or poor you are. You take the greatest loss of all when you are exiled, you take the loss of losing everything that makes it seem purposeful for you to live out the day you just began. This is obviously the idea the author is trying to get across in this poem.     Throughout the poem The Seafarer, also composed by an unknown author, it is obvious that the man is not exiled directly in the ways people have been exiled in the other poems, however being stuck on a ship is in many ways quite similar to being exiled from your homeland. Numerous passages in this poem show this mans painful life at sea. The one that stands out most greatly to me is this passage;

One of the similarities between the Wanderer and the Seafarer is the separation of the protagonists from their comitatus and exile from their society. The Wanderer is separated from his comitatus because he escapes from a war and leaves them. During this time all the members of his comitatus die leaving him to be the only survivor of his comitatus. The Wanderer is also an exile because the members of the society do not accept him when they realize what he did to his comitatus. At the very beginning of “The Wanderer”, the narrator states that he is “sailing endlessly and aimlessly in exile” and further into the poem he says that he is “alone, an exile in every land”. The Seafarer separates himself from his comitatus for atonement of his sins and he is an exile because while he goes “back and forth...in a hundred ships, in a hundred ports” that he becomes Christian so he goes on ‘“the paths of exile stretch

[and] so graced by God”. The speaker clearly uses alliteration to express his feelings towards his journey. He also establishes to the reader that he is influenced by a religious motive. His ideas may have contributed to the religious values the Anglo- Saxons believed in: Pagan, and Christian. The man also describes his experience on sea as he , “drifting [drifted] through winter on an ice cold sea, whirled in sorrow, alone in a world blown clear of love, hung with icicles. Through the use of imagery we can understand the isolated setting of the ocean, and how his loneliness led to a deepening sadness. Overall, “The Seafarer” influenced today’s literature through the use of various literary devices. The man’s personal feelings and ideas about