Exile and Suffering Essay Example for Free

Exile and Suffering EssayEarly scholars of Anglo-Saxon literature believed that The Seafarer delineated an early pagan poem that had been adapted for Christian audiences by the insertion of pious formulas throughout and a moral at the end accordingly, these scholars expended considerable ingenuity in attempting to excise the Christian elements to discover the palpable poem hidden 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(prenominal) dozen direct references to God and the heavens in the last twenty-five lines. Now, however, critics seem generally to sum that the two halves of the poem are unified by a movement from earthly chaos to celestial order and that its coherent thematic thrust is the Christian message that the after vivification is more important than life on Earth.The poe m is frequently discussed in conjunction with The Wanderer, another Exeter Book poem that shares many themes and motifs with The Seafarer, including the building in which a specific treatment of biographical subject matterthe plight of a rover or Seafareris followed by a more general homiletic section that draws a sacred meaning from the earlier material.The sailor, as a man required traveling over a strange and dangerous environment, had always seemed to Christian poets to be a naturally apt image of the believers life on Earth, which should be viewed as a hazardous journey to the true home play of promised land 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 seafaring life as much for its qualification as a means of spiritual discipline as for any commercial gain to be derived from it.The original opposition 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 forbidding as the sea, and the virtuous, at least, should hope that they allow for be sojourning in this harsh world for only a brief time.True Christian Seafarers moldiness psychologically distance themselves from secular life, as the Seafarer of this poem has done both literally and figuratively. The poet appears to encapsulate his theme at the pivotal midpoint of the poem therefore the joys of the Lord seem warmer to me than this late(prenominal) life, fleeting on land. This recommended ascetic withdrawal from worldly interests should enable the Christian to properly reject the console of life on the land as transient and seek spiritual rather than physical comforts.