Theme Of The Seafarer And The Wanderer

The key idea of suffering is at the heart of this poem. Own uses alliteration, sibilance combined with hard consonants and personification to give us a descriptive image of the conditions that the men suffered in. The “iced east winds that knife us” is expressed through the consonants “t” and “d” and sibilant “s”s to create an edge to the conditions, which “knife” his men. The use of imagery leaves us in no doubt that the pain they inflict is

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.

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.

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 main argument of the book ‘The Sea-Wolf’ is about opposing behaviors of human being depicted by the role of nature in revealing the inner self of a person. In this regard, London uses two of his main characters to demonstrate the distinct opposing sides of human beings. The first part is about Humphrey, who is a young Dutch struggling with his demons and difficulties in the sea as he hope to change his life and those of fellow crews . Humphrey is initially weak, rich and naïve, and with straight morals . Humphrey believes on fairness, compassion, and all through the story despite being close to the evil Larsen he refuses to follow his footsteps .

The Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, era of England lasted from about 450-1066 A.D. The tribes from Germany that conquered Britain in the fifth century carried with them both the Old English language and a detailed poetic tradition. The tradition included alliteration, stressed and unstressed syllables, but more importantly, the poetry was usually mournful, reflecting on suffering and loss.1These sorrowful poems from the Anglo Saxon time period are mimetic to the Anglo-Saxons themselves; they reflect the often burdened and miserable lives and times of the people who created them. The Anglo-Saxon poems, “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and “The Wife’s Lament,”

During the Anglo-Saxon time period, individuals wrote poems about achievements, deaths, emotions, and adventures taken by certain individuals. There were many popular poems during this era including, “Beowulf” translated by Burton Raffer and “The Wanderer” translated by Charles W. Kennedy. Although both these poems were written during this era, “Beowulf” was an epic poem and “The Wanderer” was an elegiac poem. However, both of these pieces shared certain characteristics related to the culture and values of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Many attributes that make up this culture are related to both Pagan and Christian beliefs. This includes many ideals relating to fate and God. The culture and values of Anglo-Saxons through “Beowulf” and “The Wanderer”, suggest that along one’s quest emerges an individuals outlook on ways of life.

“Seahorses” is a non-rhyming poem with seven ten-line stanzas, which all prominently exhibit the poem’s four main literary devices: imagery, diction, symbolism and rhythm. Leithauser’s eloquent diction and well-placed line and stanza breaks help to construct a relaxing, peaceful rhythm that creates the elegant feeling of a seahorse slowly swimming through the azure waters of the ocean. To add a layer of vivid images to this already enthralling literary canvas, Leithauser uses descriptive vocabulary, such as sparsity, menagerie and nonsynchronous, to describe the situation and help the poem appeal to each of the reader’s five senses. The most subtle, yet possibly most impactful literary device displayed in the poem is symbolism. Leithauser utilizes symbolism throughout the poem to give the poem greater depth and extract deeper meaning from a topic usually thought of as simple and childish. Appearing predominantly in the final two stanzas, but present throughout the poem, Brad Leithauser uses the idea of the seahorse to represent imagination, and the “release” that it can present from our every-day troubles. This message is embodied by the poem’s final sentence which states, “If there’s to be any egress for you and me from the straitening domain of the plausible, what

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:

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.

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,

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

A man chosen as a seafarer endures alone in a blue abyss and survives through the harsh winds and hostile territory alone, with none to confide his suffering to other than himself, and virtually no reasons to continue the sufferation known as life, yet, despite the odds, he lives on, and tells his suffering in a poem known as “The Seafarer”. In “The Seafarer”, the author of the poem releases his long held suffering about his prolonged journey in the sea. While the poem explains his sufferings, the poem also reveals why he endured anguish, and lived on, even though the afterlife tempted him. Besides expressing his reasons to live, more importantly, the poem narrates the huge impacts of Christianity on him.