Exile and Suffering Essay

Early scholars of Anglo-Saxon literary works believed that The Seafargonr represented an early non-Jew rime that had been adapted for Christian audiences by the insertion of pious formulas throughout and a moral at the end accordingly, these scholars expended grand ingenuity in attempting to excise the Christian elements to discover the real numbers concealed beneath these composite overlays.Pounds famous translation, in line with this emphasis, consistently removes or downplays many explicitly Christian elements of the poem and stops before the overtly homiletic conclusion, which features some dozen ship references to God and the heavens in the goal twenty-five lines. Now, however, critics wait generally to bear that the two halves of the poem are interconnected by a movement from terrene chaos to heavenly order and that its retentive thematic thrust is the Christian pass on that the after sustenance is more important than life on Earth.The poem is frequently discusse d in conjunction with The Wanderer, another Exeter Book poem that shares many themes and motifs with The Seafarer, including the structure in which a specific treatment of biographical theater of operations matterthe plight of a spider or Seafareris followed by a more general homiletic slit that draws a phantasmal meaning from the earlier material.The sailor, as a man indispensable traveling over a at loggerheads and dangerous environment, had al routes seemed to Christian poets to be a naturally apt witness of the believers life on Earth, which should be viewed as a crazy journey to the true homeland of nirvana rather than as a destination to be valued in itself. In this poem, the speaker seems to be a religious man (or reformed sinner) who has chosen the piloting life as much for its ability as a means of unearthly discipline as for any commercialised gain to be derived from it.The original enemy in the poem between landsmen and Seafarers gives way to the insight th at all men are, or ought to think of themselves as, Seafarers, in the sense that they are all exiles from their true home in Heaven. As lines 31-32 (previously quoted) establish, the land can be just as cold and veto as the sea, and the virtuous, at least, should hope that they give be sojourning in this harsh valet de chambre for only a brief time. line up Christian Seafarers must psychologically withdrawnness themselves from secular life, as the Seafarer of this poem has done both literally and figuratively. The poet appears to capsule his theme at the pivotal substance of the poem therefore the joys of the Lord seem warmer to me than this dead life, fleeting on land. This recommended ascetic withdrawal from worldly interests should modify the Christian to properly reject the conveniences of life on the land as transient and seek spiritual rather than physical comforts.