The Manner in which Language Informs The Seafarer
If every artistic act is ultimately a social act, then poems as verbal artifacts cannot be removed from their social milieu, the totality of ambient conditions and circumstances existing among poet and audience at the time of the poems’ creation and reception.
In other words, poems as socially and temporally conditioned expressions of meaning can only be decoded from within psycho-social and intellectual perspectives of the era in which they were written and first read. But if this is so, we may well ask whether any poem like “The Seafarer” could ever be understood on its own merits by a modern reader without a full critical and historical commentary supplying any defect in information that reader might have. Is it then possible for modern readers to engage “The Seafarer” as they would any other poem from any other era using a kind of reader’s response to help craft its meaning for themselves? Perhaps this dichotomy is false. Maybe the fact that artistic acts are social acts also means that modern readers actually constitute an extension of the original poem’s audience. However, the problem is not just how modern readers can join that audience but how the structure of the poem itself conveys its meaning to readers who sometimes must eavesdrop as a class of cultural and temporal tourists.
In the case of “The Seafarer”, the first consideration is that of language. Unless readers invest a lot of time studying Old English, they cannot read the poem in its original form because the divergence between the Englishes of the poem’s writer and today’s readers actually constitutes two different languages. Readers must then depend upon the skills of translators to render the poem’s actual meaning, if not its prosodic music. The problem with this compromise, however, is that the original poem depends upon structural relationships that only exist within the original language. Replicating such verbal effects in translation is nigh unto impossible because of the different syntactical dynamics that exist in the original and the receiving languages. Still, despite these difficulties, one can yet discern rhetorical and poetic features that structure the meaning of the poem even in translation. Realizing that what the poem means really resides in how the poem works as a vehicle of meaning, readers can approach interpreting “The Seafarer” confident of understanding and appreciating a poem whose cultural as well as linguistic particularities are so unlike their own.
Adopting a realistic, matter-of-fact approach towards discovering meaning within the poem’s rhetorical structure prevents readers from falling into further false dichotomies, like asking whether “The Seafarer” should be read literally or allegorically. Accepting the inherent ambiguity of the poem without a specific need to resolve all thematic disparities allows readers to reconcile the interrelated themes of isolation, loneliness, human and divine comfort, the desire for earthly and heavenly glory, and the ultimate emptiness of all earthly endeavors within the poem’s inherent metaphysical presumptions about the nature of reality.
First, it must be said that out of all the cultural threads woven together in this poem, the pagan, both Germanic and Celtic, the heroic, the elegiac, the lay, and the Christian, the Christian thread holds the whole together. The poet who wrote “The Seafarer” (most likely a monk) brought together all the cultural riches at his disposal at the time to craft an ultimately Christian poem. This poem uses image, metaphor, irony, and allusion to craft its tale, just as any modern poem would, but it also employs a specifically medieval device: a moral. The moral of the poem can only be approached from within polar opposition. For, after all, the moral of the poem is that all opposites find resolution in God, the ultimate reality.
At its very beginning, the poem presents its first polar opposition: the deprivations of a life at sea with all its heavy cares versus the carefree life on the land. However, there is at the same time another polarity balancing the speaker’s physical against his spiritual suffering: that which tears at the flesh as opposed to that which afflicts the soul. On both planes of opposition, though, the poem proceeds from generalities to specifics to draw its descriptive contrasts. It is clear from the beginning that the speaker’s pain is both physical and psychic insofar as the sea “swept me back / And forth in sorrow and fear and pain” (2b-3). External and internal suffering are then set in a balance, so to speak. On the one side, we have a crystal image of the speaker’s physical situation “when [he] sweated in the cold / Of an anxious watch, perched in the bow / As it dashed under cliffs” (6b-8a) with his “feet … cast / In icy bands, bound with frost, / With frozen chains” (8b-10a). And on the other we glimpse the speaker’s interior condition given how the sea has “[s]howed me suffering” (4a) (that is, given him “bitre breostceare” or “bitter breastcare”), how “hardship groaned / Around my heart (10b-11a), and how “Hunger tore / At my seaweary soul” (11b-12a). Taken together, the two opposites present an interesting duality: on one side we have a cold image of the frost acting as a fetter, and on the other, we have a rather “hot” image of care clasping the heart. In both his inner and outer dimensions, then, the speaker does not share the reality of those who enjoy the comfort of the land: “No man sheltered / On the quiet fairness of earth can feel / How wretched I was” (12b-14a).
The next few lines reinforce the poem’s initial polarity and provide more concrete images of the speaker’s inner and outer circumstances. With the concrete experience of a year at sea, the speaker knows full well the “paths of the exile” (15) (“wraeccan lastum” in Old English) far from the erstwhile comforts afforded by the communion of “friendly kinsmen” (16) (“winemae gum” in the original text). Unfortunately, here is where Raffel’s text may fall down in relation to the original, because he has translated “wraecca,” the wretch banished into exile far from the protection of the tribe, as one “wretched” and “whirled in sorrow,” and the comforts of the kinsmen are lost in “a world blown clear of love.” But the concrete images of being berimed, “[h]ung with icicles,” while “hailstorms flew” in showers about him carries forth the feeling of the original and reinforces the isolation and enclosure of the opening lines. Where Raffel’s translation really fails is in setting up in the reader’s mind the full significance of a dichotomy yet to be fully explored: the polarity between the isolated “exile” far from the support system of the “kin,” and the pagan and earthly joys and protections afforded by the “duguth,” the fighting band and extended family of any member of Anglo-Saxon society. In fact, the word only occurs twice in the poem, once properly translated as “host” (as in “heavenly host”) in line 81a and another time incorrectly translated as “powers” in line 88. The opposition between the existential isolation of the “wraecca” and the communal life within a “duguth,” however, is fulcrum that moves the whole of “The Seafarer” to its ultimately Christian conclusion.
Hearing naught but the “roaring sea,” the seafarer- exile evokes the life on land within a “duguth” by imagining the “song of the swan,” the “cry of the sea-fowl,” and the “croaking of birds” to take the place of human “laughter,” and the “mewing of gulls” to replace the joys of the mead-hall where the warrior band (or “duguth”) would gather to socialize and “recreate.” Yet the fantasy fails because the bird voices that had feigned comfort are replaced with shrieks that drive home the seafarerexile’s utter loneliness, where “[no] kinsman could offer comfort there, / To a soul left drowning in desolation” (25-26). Basically, the “sea versus land” dichotomy has been expanded to include the “exile (“wraecca”) bereft of ‘duguth’ ” polarity as well. All of these images serve to extend themes already established, however, by providing a new set of implied contrasts but with tactile and auditory stimuli embellishing an already developed aural style. Still, the images contrast with one another without an expressed relationship between them.
Nevertheless, even as the poem progresses toward a more detailed, concrete, and individualized expression of the speaker’s existential experience, the imagery tends to “flatten out” a bit into a repetitive remonstration that those who live in “cities” (“in burgum”) have no idea “how wearily / I put myself back on the paths of the sea” (29b-30). Still, notice how a new polarity is conjured here between the “passion of cities, swelled proud with wine” and the seafarer-exile’s resigned return to the “paths of the sea” (“brimlade” in the original). This contrast actually sets up a later dichotomy between ascetic determination and earthly recklessness.
The real significance of the passage is that it leads to a reversal of the conditions first described in the poem. Indeed, one could say that a climax and a thematic shift change the direction of the whole poem here. Instead of on the sea, the frost and hail now fall on the land and bind the land fast, not the speaker’s feet, and the speaker’s “heart,” instead of suffering with care, begins “to beat, knowing once more / The salt waves tossing and the towering sea!” (34-35). Though some may say that the shift is sudden and unexpected, the fact is that such an opinion assumes that the poem fails to eliminate the polarities between sea-exile-woe and land-duguth-weal or that the poem has failed to clarify the distinction between the internal and external states of the speaker. Lines 31-33a provide a bridge from one set of polar opposites to another, a transformed set of contraries that actually reverse the order of the earlier polar hierarchy so that the life on the sea appears as a new higher good as opposed to that on land. The only way this sudden shift makes sense, however, is from within the subsuming perspective of the whole poem. And this perspective is that life anywhere outside of God’s presence is bound to be hardship and suffering. As far as the speaker is now concerned at this point of the poem, “the mind’s desire urges … the spirit to travel” (a perhaps more literal rendition of lines 36- 37 than Raffel’s).
The fact is that the poet calls forth images and then qualifies his view of them while still keeping alive in the reader’s mind the evanescent effects of the original images already so graphically depicted. Even though this may cause confusion for some, it bespeaks a kind of stylistical sophistication to others. While reaffirming the contrast between the duguth-lifestyle on the land with the seafaring life at sea, the speaker brings up God for the first time in the next passage (39-46). In this mix, God cannot be ignored by anyone on the sea, where no one knows “what Fate has willed and will do” (43). This may not be so for landlubbers, because the same polarity already mentioned shows up again at this point of the poem. The ascetic seafaring life now contrasts with a looser and more frivolous life on the land, where “harps ring in [one’s] heart” (44) and “passion for women” and “worldly pleasure” (45) play off against “the ocean’s heave” (46). As stated above, the dichotomies remain in opposition to each other, but the contrariety between the elements has shifted. The privations of the sea are now a type for moral and spiritual purgation that sets seafaring at a higher moral order than the safe life within the “duguth.” Still, the skill of the poet as rhetorician prevents him from pressing home his point just yet. He merely evokes an order of discontent that perhaps transcends the sufferings laid out earlier in the poem: “ac a hafath longunge se the on lagu fundath,” that is, “but ever hath longing he who sets out to sea” (Raffel has “But longing wraps itself around him”). It is as yet unclear whether this “longing” is for the carnal life of the settled land or for something higher.
Nonetheless, the fresh fullness of life burgeoning on earth in the spring is perhaps at least one part of the speaker’s “longing.” The change of spring in the air also spells the beginning of other sea journeys for “that willing mind / Leaping to journeys, always set / In thoughts traveling on a quickening tide” (50b-52). The fact that the mind is now “willing” or “eager” (“fusne” in the Old English) to make its sea journey bespeaks a literal “sea-change” in the speaker’s attitudes towards the seagoing life. And again, nature provides some response to the speaker’s interior condition with the mournful cries of the springtime cuckoo, “summer’s sentinel.” Where the calls of the hatchling cuckoo may signify the fructification of the earth by nature to some, it may here bring about a polar opposite response. Here it reminds the speaker of the coming of “death’s sentinel,” the sea journey itself. As the speaker redundantly repeats, “Who could understand, / In ignorant ease, what we others suffer / As the paths of exile stretch endlessly on?” Perhaps only the cuckoo knows and answers with an equivocal call of invitation and warning.
The “push-pull” of the cuckoo’s cry truly reflects the speaker’s inner state of mind, in which his “heart wanders away” and his “soul roams with the sea,” “returning ravenous with desire.” The speaker’s “soul” now flies “solitary, screaming, exciting me / To the open ocean, breaking oaths / On the curve of a wave” (62-64). These are a far cry from his earlier states of mind towards seafaring. The only explanation for this change of view can be found in the next section of the poem: all “the joys of God / Are fervent with life, where life itself / Fades quickly into the earth” (65-67). Only the “joys of God” are “fervent with life” while life itself is ephemeral. At last, the reason for the puzzling shift in perspective in lines 31-33a has become clearer. Life on the earth itself, whether with one’s kinsmen or alone on the sea, is itself “empty” and “vain.” Even the greatest strivings one can endure will only earn feeble praise, whether from earthly supporters or even heavenly hosts. The only surety in life is death, and only God can give death meaning. Despite making the thematic shift more understandable, the poet as yet has still not succeeded in closing the structure of his hierarchy of goods upon the transcendent sine qua non that holds his opposing polarities in order.
Before getting to that, the poet shifts the poem’s outlook yet again with a hefty section of elegiac reflection from 82 to 104 in Raffel’s translation. One can’t really call this section a “lament” as such because of the healthy dose of Christian transience that underpins its Weltanschauung. A lament, properly speaking, would resound with despair, not with acquiescence. Here the vanity of life on earth is almost rattled off like a shopping list of “things to expect if you’re alive.” There isn’t any whining or mourning about it all, really, just the cold, hard facts that all things put together fall apart. Those scholars who have labored long at fashioning this section as some kind of pagan elegy (Celtic or Germanic) fail to see the poet’s examples of indictments of the tribal “duguth” to escape loss and privation. The loss of heroic times says more about the nature of time itself than whether or not pagan times were being missed in this passage. Notice how the passing of glory is attended with the giving of gold in this passage, much as with any pagan burial custom, “but nothing / Golden shakes the wrath of God / For a soul overflowing with sin, and nothing / Hidden on earth rises to Heaven.”
In this last section of the poem, all the conflicting polarities finally find resolution. The hierarchy of conflicting goods ultimately rises up to the top, for God alone is the unchanging good, and losing the joy of His presence is the ultimate evil. Rather than being fools who “forget,” we should remember that “God [is] mightier than any man’s mind” and our “thoughts should turn to where our home is.” At last it is clear that neither being a “wretched” exile nor being “duguth” member can solve these deeper existential issues in themselves. To set sail into harrowing circumstances or to stay in the safety of the tribal band is all one when viewed from a transcendental point of view. All of life is a transitory journey, a brief sojourning before death takes all, good or bad. The “moral” of this medieval poem is that whatever we do, we should “[c]onsider the ways of coming there, / Then strive for sure permission for us / To rise to that eternal joy, / That life born in the love of God / And the hope of Heaven” (120-124). Otherwise, we merely suffer the pains of our exile without salvation ever finding us.
Source: Michael Lake, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.
A Harsh, Lonely and Fallen World
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 living in a diminished universe, of a place less great than the past. What this sense of diminishment evokes is a deep sense of insecurity and rootlessness in the present, a notable absence of order, and a grave sense of grief that is reflected, organically, in the inhospitableness of nature. In short, the world we encounter in many Anglo-Saxon poems is the realm of the elegy. Nature has fallen and taken the survivors with it.
In “The Seafarer,” “The days are gone / When kingdoms of earth flourished in glory.” The Anglo-Saxon mind located itself in a time and place that offered few creature comforts; it perceived its place in the continuum as having come after the great events of history and in the wake of the Roman Empire and its splendor. Like the vacuum we encounter in a more modern rendering of the same theme, Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” the world presents a meager offering of possibilities, and the future is a stark, if not totally bleak, prospect. Life can only be filled with a restlessness because the absence of greatness is so tremendously encountered. The world of the Anglo-Saxon poem is place of ruins, a cold, “darkling plain” (to borrow the phrase from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”) where the persona wanders homelessly from one place to the next, all the time feeling the bite and sting of a fallen Nature. One always has the feeling when reading Anglo-Saxon poetry that the world is locked in a perpetual winter, and in the chronology of English poetry, we really do not encounter a convincing thematic springtime until Geoffrey Chaucer returns from Italy in 1370 with the iambic line under his belt and the first inklings of the Renaissance Italian mind dancing fancifully on the road to Canterbury.
In the case of “The Seafarer,” there is an Aeneas-like drive in the persona toward that “everretreating horizon,” a restlessness that can perceive a better world where “Orchards blossom” and “towns bloom” but which is driven by an inward anxiety where “longing wraps around him” and his “heart wanders away.” In this world, Nature is not man’s respite, as it will become centuries later during the early Romantic era, but an animate, almost Ovidian setting where the elements work against human intention. The voice of “The Seafarer” explains in the second line that his life, “This tale” of “mine,” is about “How the sea took me, swept me back / And forth in sorrow and fear and pain / Showed me suffering in a hundred ships, / In a thousand ports, and in me.” The sea, a handy surrogate for Nature in these opening lines, takes the form of a nemesis in much the same way that Poseidon was the nemesis of Odysseus in The Odyssey. But unlike the very pointed intentions of the Greek gods who diced with so many fates in the vast scope of the Homeric universe, there is a blitheness to Anglo-Saxon nature, an ethos of misery for which Man, in the Christian context, is ultimately to blame. This is the realm of fallen Nature, where Man’s free will, the very force that drives the seafarer anxiously from port to port, becomes his tormentor. The individual, in this context, is very much alone. He must bear, almost as an Everyman, the weight of a fallen world. Lament it as he may, there is no respite. The lot of the individual is so universal and so shared as the common destiny of humanity that there is no room for solace among shipmates, and everyone, ultimately, is a loner.
What is curious about Anglo-Saxon poetic personas is their capacity to pursue loneliness. The persona of “The Seafarer” finds some brief consolation in “the song of the swan” that “might serve for pleasure, the cry of the sea-fowl, / The croaking of birds instead of laughter, / The mewing of gulls instead of mead” or “The passion of cities swelled proud with wine / And no taste of misfortune.” Yet he continually trudges back, “wearily, “on the paths of the sea.” What calls him back “eagerly” is his “soul.” The suggestion here is that the world is a place without peace or repose, that pleasure and comfort are illusions because they too, like the glories of the past, quickly fade from sight. One is reminded of the Latin maxim sic transit gloria mundi (so passes the glory of the world) as a kind of operative axiom behind the Seafarer’s psychology. On the one hand, the Seafarer needs to tell his story and relate his hardships in a world that is far from accommodating, while on the other he feels an obligation, in the Boethian sense, to perceive the wonder of Nature as God’s work and to offer, accordingly, the correct response of praise, even if he must struggle to praise God through a litany of meteorological misery.
The key to understanding “The Seafarer” lies in the relationship between its form and its content. As a poem, it is a complex set of paradoxes. On one hand, it complains about how awful it is to live in Nature, while on the other hand it offers praises and thanks to God for a world “fervent with life, where life itself / Fades quickly into the earth.” There is not much to celebrate here, yet that is how the poem ends. The poem is a mixture of forms: a prayer to the glories of God with an Amen tucked neatly at the end; a narrative that tells of a life of hardship, suffering and anxiety; and an elegy that acknowledges a loss or imbalance in Nature and grieves over the perceived absence. As a prayer to God, the poem asks for God’s grace to see the seafarer through his constant journeys and travails and presents a thankful praise to God who “Gave life to the world and light to the sky.” The poem is also narrative that recounts with a balance of almost epic objectivity and personal involvement the harshness of the world and the difficulties of moving through a nature that, although of God’s making, is not “user friendly” to the average mortal. But it is as an elegy that the poem speaks loudest. The reader is not quite sure what has been lost in Nature or what has made conditions so lamentable, but he is aware that “The praise the living pour on the dead / Flowers from reputation: plant / An earthly life of profit reaped / Even from hatred and rancor, of bravery / Flung in the devil’s face, and death / Can only bring you earthly praise / And a song to celebrate a place / With the angels …” In other words, as Thomas Gray put it, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
The great elegiac question then arises: what is the purpose of life, and to this the poem answers to “fear God.” “Death,” he notes, “leaps at the fools who forget their God. / He who lives humbly has angels from Heaven / To carry him courage and strength and belief.” The relationship between God and the fallen, miserable world of the poem is that of an exemplum and an argument. The world is an example of God’s handiwork, yet it has fallen because of human weakness. The Seafarer warns, “Treat all the world as the world deserves / With love or with hate but never with harm” because “Fate is stronger / And God mightier than any man’s mind.” In essence, the world’s misery is a contrasting example to God’s goodness and capabilities. The hardships, the pain, and the sufferings are set before Man to remind him of the glories of Heaven, because Heaven is “where our home is.” To be an outcast in the world is only a paltry issue; to be an outcast from God is a pretty serious consequence. The allegory here is that humankind is meant to “navigate” the world in order to find that true home that always seems to be retreating on the horizon—a home called Heaven. The Seafarer notes, “To rise to that eternal joy, / That life born in the love of God / And the hope of Heaven” is the goal that lies beyond the hardship, the port at the end of the storm. In effect, the entire world, all of Nature is a cruel, unforgiving sea, but the good soul, the navigator, has his sights set on his destination. If the soul is restless, it is so because, like Odysseus, it is anxious to get home.
Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.
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