The Seafarer | Themes

Alienation and Loneliness
As a poetic genre, elegy generally portrays sorrow and longing for the better days of times past. To conjure up its theme of longing, “The Seafarer” immediately thrusts the reader deep into a world of exile, hardship, and loneliness. The speaker of the poem describes his feelings of alienation in terms of physical privation and suffering: “My feet were cast / In icy bands, bound with frost, / With frozen chains, and hardship groaned / Around my heart” (8b-11a). The cold that seizes his feet, immobilized in the hull of his open-aired ship...

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