Loyalty, Love, Nature and Lord
Among the few manuscripts containing Old English verse that have survived the ravages of time, The Exeter Book seems to contain the most famous Old English works known today. It is this Exeter Manuscript that contains the two compositions, namely "The Wanderer" and "The Wife's Lament" that I find of particular interest. The respective narrators of these two compositions are both in a state of exile. The way the poet of each composition explains the situation, relationships, and personality of his respective narrator is what makes the two compositions so completely different, and yet similar, all at once. In the following text, I will compare the similarities and differences between the two compositions mentioned above. The focus of this comparison will be the different ways that the relationship of a narrator and his or her lord is expressed and perceived. Both "The Wanderer" and "The Wife's Lament" are good examples of the popular Old English form of literature called the elegy. As defined loosely in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Abrams, 1999):[A]n elegy is a formal, and usually long, poetic lament for someone who has died; [...] the term is also used to designate poems on the transience of earthly things
He who has had long to forgo the counsel of a beloved lord knows indeed how, when sorrow and sleep together bind the poor dweller-alone, it will seem to him in his mind that he is embracing and kissing his liege lord and laying his hands and his head on his knee, as it sometimes was in the old days when he took part in the gift-giving. " Thus both the Wife and the Wanderer have lost their respective lords and are mournful of their losses. The way the poet of "The Wife's Lament" provides verbal imagery of the Wife's forest home enhances the feelings of loneliness and misery that is the Wife's lot. In "The Wife's Lament," the narrator is a female and is mourning her desolate state of affairs, longing for the return of her "lord," that is, her husband. Then he wakens again, the man with no lord, sees the yellow waves before him, the sea-birds bathe, spread their feathers, frost and snow fall, mingled with hail (101). He sees the waves and the color of the sky all too clearly and tastes the bitter smell of winter in the air. The poet introduces the speaker immediately as a male warrior according the translation by E. " The longing and desire for companionship she expresses through her words, and how she describes the painfully long days she must endure without her lover, gives an impression of the degree of emotion and passion she feels towards her exiled love. The general theme of both of these compositions conforms to this definition. He is full of sorrow for his fallen comrades and his king. For example she says, "Here very often my lord's going away has wrenched me (103)" after describing her desolate, wild habitat. "[H]ere and there through this middle-earth wind-blown walls stand covered with frost-fall, storm-beaten dwellings (101).
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