Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"
    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"
    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"
    Ebook46 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535839457
    A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?

      May 28, 2019

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?
      6 min read

    • Article

      'The World Broke In Two': Four Writers, One Transformational Year

      Jul 25, 2017

      Using excerpts from letters and diaries, historian and critic Bill Goldstein follows writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot through the tumultuous literary year of 1922.

      3 min read

    • Article

      On Memory and Literature

      Jun 30, 2021

      Now we're all possessors of personal supercomputers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul. The post On Memory and Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      18 min read

    • Article

      I Am Taught By Towels

      Sep 19, 2018

      It’s impressive how educational hand-drying the dishes can be. Almost without knowing it, one may absorb a range of more or less useful information as the cutlery gets drier and the dishcloth damper. I am thinking in particular of two literary dish t

      3 min read

    • Article

      The END of LITERATURE

      Sep 4, 2018

      LITERATURE’S MAINSTREAM is not a river that flows between fixed banks, but one that must be cut, and it is the experimental writer who, avoiding the backwaters of the often more lucrative and momentarily celebrated conventional writing, can be found

      7 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: The Diomedes By Matthew Hollis

      Oct 9, 2023

      The Diomedes Summers he would sail for Alaska working the crabbers as deckhand or galley; autumns returning with old-weather stories of clam catchers, fur trappers, and the twin isles of Diomede: two miles and a continent between them; and how,

      3 min read

    • Article

      To the Last Be Human

      Sep 9, 2022

      An excerpt from Robert Macfarlane's introduction to Jorie Graham's '[To] The Last [Be] Human.' The post To the Last Be Human appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Potent And Particular Landscape

      May 1, 2019

      AP2 Books C.D. Wright, Casting Deep Shade: An AmbleHardcover, 160 pagesCopper Canyon Press, 2019 “I waken repeatedly to gnarly misgivings and adversarial imagining… in flaming dread of us, the next annihilating asteroid,” confesses C.D. Wright in Cas

      6 min read

    • Article

      Pursuing the White Whale

      Dec 2, 2019

      Pursuing the White Whale
      4 min read

    • Article

      Terror From The Skies

      Oct 6, 2022

      Terror From The Skies
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Deep Time of Walden Pond

      May 10, 2018

      A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage, although fans and detractors alike often misunderstand this. It was more an author’s workshop than a fortress of isola

      16 min read

    • Article

      The Volta

      Mar 1, 2024

      One characteristic element of a sonnet is the turn, or to use the Italian word, volta. The typical definition holds that: In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the

      14 min read

    • Article

      Native American Poetry Anthology Vibrates With Powerful Voices

      Sep 16, 2020

      U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent.

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Hero For These Times

      Dec 2, 2020

      AS lockdown ends today, the tiers of Covid-19 restriction take effect and Christmas is precisely regimented, the freedom of the countryside and the natural world becomes more important. Amid our growing resentment, the development of a vaccine gives

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reading In The Anthropocene

      Jun 16, 2021

      Reading In The Anthropocene
      11 min read

    • Article

      Fishing For Poetry And More

      Jan 5, 2021

      Fishing For Poetry And More
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Armchair Angler

      Dec 31, 2019

      The Shining Tides By Win Brooks Pocket Books Win Brooks expands the reaches of striped bass fishing into pulp fiction with his 1952 novel The Shining Tides. With a setting like Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and characters like Father O’Meara and Stormy Fo

      2 min read

    • Article

      Mary Shelley And Mourning As An Essential Act Of Apocalypse

      Feb 28, 2018

      1. Little cloud-white lambs wobble over the leas and paddocks, nibbling clover under a wooly sky. Ladies and lords and mustachioed manservants converse through the halls of castles. The subjects and soldiers in the hay fields out past the battlements

      5 min read

    • Article

      Earth Lines

      Sep 1, 2022

      Earth Lines
      4 min read

    • Article

      Autumn Book Reviews

      Mar 3, 2023

      The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson Published by Vintage ISBN 9780099577249 $26.99 A classic cultural history of swimming, first published in 1992, its enigmatic title references a short story by Tennessee Williams, a true swimming obsessive. C

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Anonymous's "The Seafarer" - Gale

      1

      The Seafarer

      Anonymous

      c. 450–c. 1100

      Introduction

      The Seafarer was first discovered in the Exeter Book, a hand-copied manuscript containing the largest known collection of Old English poetry, which is kept at Exeter Cathedral, England. The Seafarer has its origins in the Old English period of English literature, 450-1100, a time when very few people knew how to read or write. Old English (the predecessor of modern English) is the name given to the Germanic tongues brought to England by the invading tribes who crossed the English channel from Northern Europe. Old English resembles German and Scandinavian languages, and one cannot read it without at least one year of intense study. Even in its translated form, The Seafarer provides an accurate portrait of the sense of stoic endurance, suffering, loneliness, and spiritual yearning so characteristic of Old English poetry. The Seafarer is divisible into two sections, the first elegiac and the second didactic. The Seafarer can be read as two poems on separate subjects or as one poem moving between two subjects. Moreover, the poem can be read as a dramatic monologue, the thoughts of one person, or as a dialogue between two people. The first section is a painfully personal description of the suffering and mysterious attractions of life at sea. In the second section, the speaker makes an abrupt shift to moral speculation about the fleeting nature of fame, fortune, and life itself, ending with an explicitly Christian view of God as wrathful and powerful. In this section, the speaker urges the reader to forget earthly accomplishments and anticipate God’s judgment in the afterlife. The poem addresses both pagan and Christian ideas about overcoming this sense of suffering and loneliness. For example, the speaker discusses being buried with treasure and winning glory in battle (pagan) and also fearing God’s judgment in the afterlife (Christian). Moreover, The Seafarer can be thought of as an allegory discussing life as a journey and the human condition as that of exile from God on the sea of life. For comparison, read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Whatever themes one finds in the poem, The Seafarer is a powerful account of a sensitive poet’s interaction with his environment.

      Poem Summary

      Lines 1-5

      The elegiac, personal tone is established from the beginning. The speaker pleads to his audience about his honesty and his personal self-revelation to come. He tells of the limitless suffering, sorrow, and pain and his long experience in various ships and ports. The speaker never explains exactly why he is driven to take to the ocean.

      Lines 6-11

      Here, the speaker conveys intense, concrete images of cold, anxiety, stormy seas, and rugged shorelines. The comparisons relating to imprisonment are many, combining to drag the speaker into

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1