The Seafarer | A Harsh, Lonely and Fallen World
Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer contends that “The Seafarer” describes a harsh, lonely, and fallen world that one must navigate through to reach one’s true home in heaven.
The world that is presented in many Anglo-Saxon poems, such as “The Seafarer,” is a cold, cruel place. It is a world that has only one redeeming feature—God’s grace—and even that is mitigated by an overwhelming sense of entropy that pervades everything. As is the case in another notable Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Wanderer,” the civilized world is perceived as something that has passed from immediate view and remains only a faint memory, a series of ruins that suggest that the past was greater than the present. For the poetic personas of this world, there is a profound sense of...
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