comes with the good memories of better times, but the soreness comes when memories cause one to miss beloved kin that are no more. There is beauty in the use ofalliteration to create a sense of rhythm in the pairing of "sorrow" and "sweet," "memory" and "mind."

"The Seafarer" records and laments the loneliness the seafarer experiences on the sea and uses images of bleak beauty:

How wretched I was, drifting through winter
On an ice-cold sea, whirled in sorrow,
Alone in a world blown clear of love,
Hung with icicles.
The hailstorms flew.
The only sound was the roaring sea,
The freezing waves.

We get a clear picture of the cold, icy, roaring world that surrounds the seafarer. He will find comfort in Christian hope.

"The Wife's Lament" also records grief and longing, because the wife lives in exile. The wife's stark bitterness is reflected in the vivid imagery of her description of her home:

Dark are the valleys, the mountains so lofty,
bitter these hovels, overgrown with thorns.
Shelters without joy.

The three poems from the Anglo-Saxon Period, "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and "The Wife's Lament", all contain elements of artistic value.

Given that each of the poems is an example of an elegiac poem, each contains the characteristics true to the elegiac poem. All contain elements of exile, each laments the loss of a loved one, and each depicts the thoughts and feelings of the speaker regarding their life.

This being said, each poem, in its own way, can be deemed artistic in regards to the language and imagery used. (When interpreting poetry, one must understand that it is a reader's individual interpretation regarding what is art in a poem.)

In "The Wanderer", one can find artistic value in the speaker's observations of the destructiveness of the world. The imagery of the middle-earth laying in waste is moving:

Blown by the wind,/ covered with frost,/ storm-swept buildings./ The halls decay,/ their lords lie/ deprived of joy,/ the whole troop has fallen,/ the proud one by the wall.

Here, one can see the destruction described by the speaker. It is the imagery which provides proof of the true artistic nature.

In "The Seafarer",the imagery, again, merits pure artistic value. In the speaker's description of his voyage, the following words are eloquently used:

All I ever heard along the ice-way/ was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty/ whooper and curlew calls and mewling gull/ were all my gaming, mead and mirth/ At tempest-tested granite crags/ the ice-winged tern would taunt/ spray-weathered ospreys overhead/ would soar and scream.

The imagery here, like in "The Wanderer", proves to provide a picture which relies on the eyes, ears, and touch of the reader. Again, the imagery here proves to be representative of the highest artistic value.

In the final poem mentioned, "The Wife's Lament", the imagery provides nothing less than pure artistic value. While much shorter than both previous poems, the perspective given here provides one of a feminine view-point. Her words tumble out as tumultuously as the waves which haunt her dreams:

First my lord left his people/ for the tumbling waves; I worried at dawn/where on earth my leader of men might be./ When I set out myself in my sorrow,/10 a friendless exile, to find his retainers,/that man’s kinsmen began to think/in secret that they would separate us,/ so we would live far apart in the world,
most miserably, and longing seized me.

Here, the reader is able to feel the suffering that the speaker feels. She is overwhelmed by the exile of her husband and desperately wishes for him to be close to her.

Overall, it is the imagery of each poem which provides proof of the artistic value each piece offers to a reader.