The Seafarer 'And The Wife's Lament'

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.

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.

The Mariner’s lifelong penance is to relay his story and message throughout the lands to the various individuals he holds a calling towards. The Mariner can only relieve his frequents bouts of extreme agony and guilt from his past by narrating his story and lesson to others, bidding them not to make the same mistake he did. Initially, the listener is reluctant to hear the Mariner’s tale, eager to get to the wedding that is about to begin. However, the listener is somehow drawn to the Mariner and yields to his tale. He becomes enchanted, and by the tale’s end, the listener is left, shocked, speechless, and in awe. He gains a new perspective of the world, and the poem ends with the words, “He [the listener] went like one that hath been stunned / And is of sense forlorn; / A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn.”

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.

The novel begins with four letters written by Robert Walton, who was sailing North, in search for a faster route. In these letters, Walton explains to his sister, Mrs. Saville, of the lonely life upon the ship and how he has no true friends. Mrs. Saville, who is following their father’s orders, reinsures her brother of the evil at sea, but Walton only wanted fame and glory. Walton is sailing through the Artic when his ship is surrounded by ice; one day among the ice, his men saw a man of a gigantic stature being led by a sled of dogs. The next morning, the sailors were on the deck when from afar they saw another dog drawn sled. Upon its approach, Walton noticed its guide was emancipated and convinced him to come aboard. All of the sailors where

About two hundred thousand people die a day, and fifty-six million die a year. Each person lost daily and yearly has to leave behind a loved one. In the Exeter book “The Seafarer” translated by Ralph Burton, “The Wanderer” translated by Charles W. Kennedy, and “The Wife’s Lament” translated by Ann Stanford can all be summarized in saying that they have to deal with the pain and sadness of losing a significant other. Each was miserable and had to find a way to cope with the feeling of loneliness. In December it will be two years since my grandpa Schneider passed away. Over seven years ago we found out he had bone cancer. With the condition his heart was in, he couldn’t handle having chemo. With bone cancer and old age

When it comes to the rhyme scheme of The Bride of the Sea, Lovecraft uses a very simplistic theme of abab. The overall scheme that he used is sometimes called an alternative rhyme. Lovecraft uses this scheme pretty often. Alternative rhyme schemes were also used in his poems Sunset, The Cats, The Messenger, and Christmas Blessing. Even though The Raven contains numerous internal rhymes, The Bride of the Sea does not. Line forty-two contains a smidgen of assonance where Lovecraft wrote, “Seeking and pining, scarce heeding my way.” Both seeking and heeding contain the similar vowel sounds. In the first stanza Lovecraft rhymed “me” with “me,” which is an identical rhyme. He was also consistent with the use of identical rhymes in A Garden as well to emphasize his main points.

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 past, Anglo- Saxon’s believed that human life was shaped by fate. Many still agree with the Anglo- Saxon belief today. The poems The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Wife’s Lament all help to shed light on this belief that fate shapes the human life. The Anglo- Saxon’s led harsh lives, and were often only relying on fate to save them. They admired humans quality of strength but ultimately the people were subjects to an unyielding destiny.

Explain what the narrator is going through during his expeditions to the North Sea? Why do you think he endures through all of this? (Letter 1)

Unlike the wandering narrator, the seafaring narrator focuses his descriptions of the community that is present in nature. The seafarer the utterly rejects the notion that a “sheltering family / could bring consolation for his desolate soul” (25-26). This “sheltering family” (25) that the seafaring narrator alludes to in this line is the exact form of close-knit family that the narrator in “The Wanderer” laments for desperately. While the seafaring narrator offers striking similar descriptions of the landscape being “bound by ice” (9), he does not focus on these descriptions to dwell on the loss of an earthly community. Instead, the narrator in “The Seafarer” finds the landscape that he inhabits wonderfully abundant with natural — even spiritual — elements that are commonly associated with an earthly community. In the barren landscape, the seafaring narrator discovers “the wild swan’s song / sometimes served for music” (19-20) and “the curlew’s cry for the laugher of men” (20-21). These vibrant and vivid descriptions of the natural world that the narrator discovers in the harsh,

There are a lot of similar themes between the poems 'The Wanderer', 'The Seafarer' and 'The Wife's Lament'. One of the easiest themes I can point out is the use of the fact that they all wander, they're wandering through their lives not knowing exactly where to go, what to do or how to do it. They all feel lonely, sadness and grief. The hardships they all go through are different but still similar in ways. The way they deal with them are also different yet similar, The Wife searches for her husband and busies herself with thoughts of their lost love and old memories to distract and maybe even deal with the fact that she does not know what she is doing or where she is going, all she knows is that she loves her husband and longs for the love

In the poem “The Seafarer” the narrator depicts an overall message: in order to get to heaven you'll have to go through the dangerous journey of life and forget all of your worldly pleasures, this is seen through imagery and symbolism of winter and spring to help us feel, hear, and see what he does. n the beginning of “The Seafarer” the narrator speaks of his dangerous journey out on sea. He talks about the winter as if it's a violent and powerful force. The narrator uses imagery of the cold frozen weather to symbolize how he feels trapped in this world, as if he is a prisoner saying, “being in icy bands, bound with frost...with frozen chains.” (Raffel 9-10).

Many messages are learned from readings, (The Seafarer) has many messages that you need to pay attention to. These messages can be very useful in everyday life. Learning messages throughout readings can always be helpful in life. Without learning these particular messages from this story you can miss the main point of the story. It's good to know what the author was trying to get at. These messages are very important and you need to understand what the author is trying to help you out with. The three main messages in (The Seafarer) from the exeter book are, things pass with time, there's eternal life, and suffering is a part of life.

[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