side of life can give a person wisdom and a valuable perspective on life, unless you overthink it. This point is emphasized several times through poetic devices and areas of the text in the Seafarer. Firstly, the author uses a change in tone when they say “The freezing waves. The song of the swan.” (The Seafarer, line 19). They do this many times throughout the poem to create a parallel from two different points of a spectrum; the painful side of life and the valuable, wise perspective of life. The
poetry. No matter in “The Seafarer”, whose narrator bears a lonely sea journey and turns to god for help; in “The Wanderer”, in which the traveler wanders alone over the sea with no family left, but keeps his faith in god; or in “The Wife’s Lament”, whose female figure expresses the deep grief of husband’s betrayal and relieves through anger, all poems expose the reality that people are suffering from the loneliness but finding ways to cope with their problems. In “The Seafarer”, the main idea is to
Dwelling upon the sorrows and painful side of life may offer a person wisdom and a valuable perspective on, but while with such thoughts, remaining on such ideas may be harmful. To begin with, in The Seafarer, translated by Burton Raffel, an example of how one man or a being may stop and focus upon the darker subjects with a sense of negativity by stating, “Who could understand, In such ignorant ease, what we others suffer?” (Raffel, line 55, 56), to shed light upon how thinking on the cross portions
despair through their writing. Despite evoking a morbid tone throughout the first half of “The Seafarer”, the speaker sheds a light of hope in the second half. Here he acknowledges the power of God and highlights the righteous path. Those descriptions are indicative of the Christian faith. The speaker’s struggle is an allusion to the Anglo-Saxon community’s struggle in finding the rightful God. And so “The Seafarer” serves as a form of propaganda that seeks to promote the conversion from Paganism to Christianity
When reading and interpreting any type of literature, it is important to attempt to discover the author's purpose in writing the work. The poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer are no exception to this. Far from being easily interpreted, both poems are packed with content, purpose, and hidden meaning. While the two poems may contain the same goals, the content and meaning differ drastically in many areas such as: feelings, methods, lessons, and teachings. In order to divine the purpose of the poem
until 1842. The Seafarer, The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament make up three of the poems in the Exeter Book. The speaker in The Seafarer tells the story of a man at sea who cannot seem to escape his struggles of isolation. In The Wanderer, a lonely traveler speaks of his loneliness while he reminisces on the good times before his exile. The Wife’s Lament takes the perspective of a women living in exile, unlike the two previous poems in The Exeter, which speak of men. In The Seafarer, The Wanderer
the life of an Anglo-Saxon warrior was a lot more darker than that. The cold truth is that kingdoms fought and people died. This resulted in warriors without their comrades, mothers without their sons, and kings without a kingdom. The poems The Seafarer and The Wanderer both greatly highlight this darker and more realistic aspect of the Anglo-Saxon warrior lifestyle. The Wanderer explores the darker side of the Anglo-Saxon warrior lifestyle as it tells the story
large role in shaping mankind’s life and behavior throughout the course of history. In The Seafarer, translated by Burton Raffel, spirituality is not only a central theme, but also helps illustrate the differences that various religions can have on one’s life span. In the poem, these two cultural practices are known as Paganism and Christianity, both of which have a direct effect in the life of the seafarer. Paganism is mainly the first part of the poem and because of its effect
In the Anglo Saxon Era, the theme of fate v. free will was represented in many texts and this shows the people of that era strongly believed the God controlled their fate. In the epic poem The Seafarer “A fool is the one who does not fear his Lord-- death comes to him unprepared. Blessed is he who lives humbly-- to him comes forgiveness from heaven. God set that spirit within him,because he believed in His might (Shmoop 116-118).” In these lines show the connection between fate and God. People believed
In “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” the narrator reveals many Anglo-Saxon ideals that present loneliness as a terrifying prospect. In each poem, a person is stranded to face the terrors of the Anglo-Saxon era on their own, with little to no reconcile for their hardships. While many aspects of the narrators change, such as gender or occupation, they are all elegies that present a mournful tone. In “The Seafarer,” “The wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” the narrators discuss