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The first part of the poem is an elegy. It is generally portraying longings and sorrow for the past. The main theme of an elegy is longing. “The Seafarer” thrusts the readers into a world of exile, loneliness, and hardships.
The speaker describes the feeling of alienation in terms of suffering and physical privation. For instance, the speaker says that “My feet were cast / In icy bands, bound with frost, / With frozen chains, and hardship groaned / Around my heart.”
He says that his feet have immobilized the hull of his open-aired ship when he is sailing across the sea. His feet are seized by the cold. The cold corresponds to the sufferings that clasp his mind. He says that he is alone in the world, which is a blown of love.
He is only able to listen to the cries of different birds who replace sounds of human laughter. He is urged to break with the birds without the warmth of human bonds with kin.
The tragedy of loneliness and alienation is not evident for those people whose culture promotes brutally self-made individualists that struggle alone without assistance from friends or family. The world of Anglo-Saxons was bound together with the web of relationships of both friends and family.
For the people of that time, the isolation and exile that the Seafarer suffers in the poem is a kind of mental death. An exile and the wanderer, because of his social separation is the weakest person, as mentioned in the poem. Without any human connection, the person can easily be stricken down by age, illness, or the enemy’s sword.
Despite the fact that the Seafarer is in miserable seclusion at sea, his inner longing propels him to go back to his source of sorrow. The anonymous poet of the poem urges that the human condition is universal in so many ways that it perdures across cultures and through time.
The human condition consists of a balance between loathing and longing. For instance, people often find themselves in the love-hate condition with a person, job, or many other things. The same is the case with the Seafarer. His condition is miserable yet his heart longs for the voyage.
The poet asserts that those who were living in the safe cities and used to the pleasures of songs and wines are unable to understand the “push-pull” that the Seafarer tolerates. However, the character of Seafarer is the metaphor of contradiction and uncertainties that are inherent within-person and life.
For instance, the poet says: “Thus the joys of God / Are fervent with life, where life itself / Fades quickly into the earth. The wealth / Of the world neither reaches to Heaven nor remains”.
The lines are suggestive of resignation and sadness. These lines echo throughout Western Literature, whether it deals with the Christian comtemptu Mundi (contempt of the world) or deals with the trouble of existentialists regarding the meaninglessness of life. The response of the Seafarer is somewhere between the opposite poles.
For the Seafarer, the greater source of sadness lies in the disparity between the glorious world of the past when compared to the present fallen world. The literature of the Icelandic Norse, the continental Germans, and the British Saxons preserve the Germanic heroic era from the periods of great tribal migration.
These migrations ended the Western Roman Empire. They were the older tribes of the Germanic peoples.
These time periods are known for the brave exploits that overwhelm any current glory. For instance, the poem says: “Now there are no rulers, no emperors, / No givers of gold, as once there were, / When wonderful things were worked among them / And they lived in lordly magnificence. / Those powers have vanished; those pleasures are dead.”.
However, the contemporary world has no match for the glorious past. The poet asserts:
“The weakest survives and the world continues, / Kept spinning by toil. All glory is tarnished. / The world’s honor ages and shrinks, / Bent like the men who mold it” .
Just like the Greeks, the Germanics had a great sense of a passing of a “Golden Age.” The speaker longs for the more exhilarating and wilder time before civilization was brought by Christendom. Even though the poet continuously appeals to the Christian God, he also longs for the heroism of pagans.
This explains why the speaker of the poem is in danger and the pain for the settled life in the city. In short, one can say that the dissatisfaction of the speaker makes him long for an adventurous life.
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