The Seafarer
Translated by Burton Raffel
Composed by an unknown poet
Part of The Exeter
Book
The Exeter Book was given to Exeter
Cathedral in the 11th century. It
contained a collection of Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts.
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 AngloSaxon 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 Seafarer – the cold,
hard facts

The following lines you’ll want to be
able to define. (understand = test)
1. “Nothing Golden shakes the Wrath of
God.”
2. “Sweated in the cold of an anxious
watch”
The Seafarer – literary
criticism
 Some believe that the poem has 2
speakers. One who makes a personal
“complaint” and a second who comments
on the condition described by the first.
 The second speaker emphasizes man’s
relationship with the divine rather than
one man’s personal plight.
The Seafarer – literary
criticism
 However, Michael Alexander, a literary
critic, believes it is not a dialogue.
“The poem is a soliloquy: a wraecca that
tells of the many winters [he] spent at
sea, and the hardship he has borne.”
The Seafarer – literary
criticism
 Rosemary Woolf believes the following:
“”…the man who lives a life on land is always
in a state of security and contentment: he is
therefore mindless of the Christian image of
man as an exile; …The sea, however, is
always a place of isolation and hardship: the
man, therefore, who chooses to be literally
what in Christian terms he is figuratively, must
forsake the land and live upon the sea.”
Reading Poetry – in
general
 Don’t stop at the end of a line, stop at the
punctuation mark. The end of the line
has to do with the “beat” of the line; it has
nothing to do with the “meaning” of the
line. Reading to the punctuation mark is
called enjambment.