The Seafarer and The Wanderer
Glory Days, Bruce Springsteen
I had a friend was a big baseball player
back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside
bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few
drinks
but all he kept talking about was
Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's
eye
Glory days, glory days
Well there's a girl that lives up the block
back in school she could turn all the boy's
heads
Sometimes on a Friday I'll stop by
and have a few drinks after she put her
kids to bed
Her and her husband Bobby well they
split up
I guess it's two years gone by now
We just sit around talking about the old
times,
she says when she feels like crying
she starts laughing thinking about
My old man worked 20 years on the line
and they let him go
Now everywhere he goes out looking for
work
they just tell him that he's too old
I was 9 nine years old and he was working at
the Metuchen Ford plant assembly line
Now he just sits on a stool down at the
Legion hall
but I can tell what's on his mind
Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
Now I think I'm going down to the well
tonight
and I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around
thinking about it
but I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days
The Seafarer
Translated by Burton Raffel
Composed by an unknown poet
The Seafarer – the cold, hard facts
• Can be considered an elegy, or mournful,
contemplative poem.
• Can also be considered a planctus, or
“complaint.” This would involve a fictional
speaker and a subject that may be loss other
than death.
• Regardless, the expression of strong emotion
is the key.
The Seafarer – the cold, hard facts
cont.
•
What the poem has that most Anglo-Saxon
poems also have:
1. Caesuras – pause in a line
2. Alliteration joins the 2 parts of the line
3. Kennings – metaphorical phrases
The Seafarer – the cold, hard facts
• Caesura and alliteration in action
“The only sound / was the roaring sea”
• Kennings
“coldest seeds” = hail
“givers of gold” = Anglo-Saxon kings
The Seafarer – the cold, hard facts
• A wraecca tells his tale; he is at sea. (A
“wraecca” was a person who had been exiled
from his community.)
• Poem highlights the balance between the
Anglo-Saxon belief in fate, where everything is
grim and overpowering, and the Christian
believer’s reliance on God.
The Seafarer – the cold, hard facts
• The land represents safety and security.
• The sea represents hardship and struggle, but
the man is drawn to it because it brings him
closer to God. The sea represents the power
of God.
• “Home” represents heaven or being closer to
God.
The Wanderer
Translated by Charles W. Kennedy
The Wanderer
This work is considered the most
nearly perfect in form and feeling of
all the surviving Old English poems.
The Wanderer
Dates back to 700 AD when Scandinavia
was in upheaval. Immigrants used songs
and poems to keep their homelands
“alive.”
Exile = separation from one’s
home or native country
For an Anglo-Saxon warrior this
meant losing his Lord and his mead
hall.
Wraecca
a word meaning “wretch, stranger,
unhappy man, and wanderer”
Literary Terms you need to know
•
•
•
•
Stoicism
Tone
Litotes
Motif
Stoicism
a state where a human does not show or
feel any emotion – completely indifferent,
not just hiding feelings
Tone
the attitude of a literary work toward
its subject and the audience (formal
vs. informal, humorous vs. serious)
Litotes
a characteristic figure of speech in Old English
poetry – a form of understatement in which a
thing is affirmed by stating the negative of its
opposite (think double negative) (ie. She was not
unkind = She was kind)
Motif
a recurring literary element that serves as
the basis for expanding the narrative
(music – When it is heard, the couple falls
in love.)
First motif found in The Wanderer
• Ubi sunt que ante nos fuerunt? (Latin for –
Where are they who before us went?)
• Lines 90 – 94
• They are nostalgic or seeking the past.
Second motif found in The Wanderer
• Mutability = the inevitability of change.
Things are going to change.
• This is at odds with the concept of nostalgia.
As a result, this poem has 2 conflicting motifs
in action.
The Wanderer in a nutshell
A stoic wraecca is at sea
remembering the mead hall and his
lost life.