preview

The Seafarer Analysis

Good Essays
Open Document

The Seafarer, like most elegies, is a poem about suffering. In this case, it details the hardships and anxieties in the life of a sailor, and the relief he finds from them in Christianity. This pious character reveals, through his own sufferings and priorities, the worries faced and the values upheld by people in the Middle Ages.
The poem begins with the line “I can sing a true song of myself,” (1) which tells the reader that this story is specifically about the speaker. The speaker is a seafaring man, and most of his hardships have to do with his difficult life at sea in the winter. The speaker’s voyage is a tumultuous one, filled with winter storms that he cannot find shelter from. Throughout the first half of the poem, there is diction invoking the cold. “Pinched with cold were my feet, bound by frost in cold fetters,” (8-10) and “hung with icicles while hail flew in showers.” (17) It is notable that his voyage takes place in the winter, because winter has historically been a time when people lacked the things they needed and worried for their survival. The Seafarer, too, lacks things he needs. He lacks shelter from the cold, because “the anxious night-watch often held [him] at the ship’s stem,” (6-7) as he looked ahead for obstacles in the ship’s path. This can be seen as a metaphor for anxiety about the future, which is a struggle not only for the speaker himself, but for many people at the time of this poem’s creation. English speakers in this time lived among the ruins of Rome; they understood that things fall apart over time. The seafarer himself later says “The days are lost, and all the pomp of this earthly kingdom,” (81-82) referring to the fall of Rome and the loss of those days of plenty.
The speaker suffers from one thing even more keenly than his lack of shelter and fear for his future: lonliness. “No sheltering family could bring consolation to my desolate soul,” (25-26) he laments. The use of the word “sheltering” here is interesting, because it echoes his lack of shelter from the elements. A family would shelter him from loneliness in the same way being in a house would shelter him from the harsh winter weather. The seafarer is so profoundly lonely that he imagines the birds as merrymaking

Get Access
Related
Get Access