What Are The Two Voices Of The Seafarer

The Shipman’s Tale, one of the many tales in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is exactly suited to the Shipman’s personality and profession as given in “The Prologue.” The shipman is described by Chaucer in the prologue as very sneaky, deceitful, and even pirate-like. The Shipman’s tale matches his personality and profession because The Shipman’s Tale is one of trickery and con. The monk in the tale tricks both the merchant and the merchant’s wife out of their money. He also uses his relationship with the merchant to his advantage, because he knows the merchant would never suspect him of having sex with his wife. The shipman is also portrayed in the prologue to have no sense of remorse or feelings of sorrow.

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.

In The Seafarer one difference is this is a self imposed exile. He was not forced to leave, he chose to leave. The speaker of The Seafarer says his journey is true and he remembers every little detail that happened to him while traveling the ocean in the middle of a cold winter. He experiences loneliness, and hatred for city people. He remembers his struggle through the long cold days. He believes he was called out and that is why he leaves his country. “Called me eagerly, sent me over the horizon.”

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 Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was written in the late 1700s. The poem’s setting starts during a wedding, an old mariner stops one of the wedding guests from going into the party to tell him a story. The mariner’s story takes place in a ship where he killed an albatross and everything started to go wrong for him and his crew. When the mariner’s story is ending he says that he has a pain to tell people about his story, this is why he stopped the wedding guest to tell him his story. The wedding guest decides not to go to the party because he became upset, he is now a “sadder” but “wiser” man. Coleridge uses many literary elements to make the story come together such as similes, personification, symbolism

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.”

In another case, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” tells a story about an old sailor, the Mariner, and his long and difficult journey across the ocean. The Mariner stops a man going into a wedding, who is called the Wedding-Guest, and insists on telling him his tale. In the beginning of the Mariner’s journey, his ship gets stuck in a never ending field of ice and fog. They have no way of moving, but then,

The speaker of “The Seafarer” is also an outcast sailing the sea in solitude, and he speaks similarly of his exile from his lord and kinsmen: “Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile/ Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles.” (II. 14-15) He seems to believe that if he has lost his fellow warriors and lord, or his friends,

Another Old English poem, The Seafarer, has a deep connection with the sea. Though the latter poem is considerably shorter than Beowulf, nevertheless the sentiments expressed therein about the sea reflect some of the same found in Beowulf. The poet begins by reflecting on the miseries which he has endured when travelling by sea in winter–miseries of which the landsman in his comfortable castle knows nothing:

The poems’ histories will be kept brief as they are not the focus of the paper; so, put simply, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 1798 in a collaborative volume entitled Lyrical Ballads (“Samuel Taylor Coleridge”). For further historical context, it was during this year that the US Navy was originally formed (“Historical Events in 1798”). And while the origin of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is pretty straightforward, that of “The Seafarer” is more complicated. Originally it was anonymously included in a tenth-century text called The Exeter Book (Shmoop Editorial Team), but the more well known version is its reinterpretation by Ezra Pound, published in 1912 (“The Seafarer: RPO”). However, since Pound changed many of the original details and themes (“The Seafarer: RPO”), we’re going to be looking at an English translation of the original poem. Again, for further historical context, it was during the tenth century that the Chinese started making paper money, the Byzantine empire underwent a revival, and the feudal knight was popularized (“10th century - Oxford Reference”). Despite both poems being published nearly 800 years apart, they share a great many similarities. So without further ado, let’s delve into the surface similarities between the two poems.

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

The speaker of “The Seafarer” believes that soon the warrior way of life will no longer be

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge writes of a sailor bringing a tale to life as he speaks to a wedding guest. An ancient Mariner tells of his brutal journey through the Pacific Ocean to the South Pole. Coleridge suffers from loneliness, because of his lifelong need for love and livelihood; similarly, during the Mariner’s tale, his loneliness shows when he becomes alone at sea, because of the loss of his crew. Having a disastrous dependence to opium and laudanum, Coleridge, in partnership with Wordsworth, writes this complicated, difficult to understand, yet appealing poem, which becomes the first poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Mariner’s frame of mind flip-flops throughout the literary ballad, a

“The Seafarer” and "The Wanderer” are both poems that describe the hardships of the average Anglo-Saxon warrior. These stories show that life during the times of the Anglo-Saxons is not pleasant. In fact, it appears to be tough, fearful, and depressing. In “The Seafarer”, a man describes his horrid life on the sea, and in "The Wanderer”, a man tells his tale of being put into exile and losing all his fellow warriors and lord. Both men feel physical and emotional pain while going through their adventure. The seafarer claims that the sea itself is torturing him by saying “...the sea took [him], swept [him] back and forth in sorrow and fear and pain.” (2-3) The seafarer also explains that coldness is much more than just a feeling but a