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Comparing Wanderer, The Wife's Lament And The Seafarer

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Exile is commonly seen in Anglo-Saxon literature, specifically the poems: The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, and The Seafarer. All three poems deal with the idea of losing something and missing the something so much it pains them to think about it. Although in many cases, the person experiencing exile has nothing to do but think about their exile. In The Wanderer, the speaker has lost all of his kinsman over time. He feels exiled by his “misery, grievous disasters, and death of kin” and he is “weary of exile.” It is physically straining for him to feel this way everyday, but he cannot do anything about it. He recounts how some of his companion’s died saying “one a bird bore over the billowing sea; one the grey wolf slew; one a grieving earl …show more content…

She is sent to live underneath an oak tree in the middle of the woods and must bear her husband’s anger everyday. In the first stanza, the woman says the pain she feels now is much more painful than anything else she has felt in her life. “I a woman tell what griefs I had since I grew up new or old never more than now.” This is the woman’s form of exile. “Often we vowed that but death alone would part us two naught else.” When her and her husband first got married she believed they would never be parted, but circumstances got in the way. Her husband’s kinsman plotted to separate them and succeeded. She misses not only her loved one, but also her young naivety about love. “I grieved each dawn wondered where my lord my first on Earth might be.” She feels thrown away without her love beside her and remembers each morning at dawn. She says her old friends are sleeping soundly in their beds and she is walking by herself alone “through these earth halls.” She describes the place she is exiled to as dark and overgrown from lack of care, which can be used to describe how she feels as well. She ends the lyric by wishing her husband to feel the same pain she feels everyday. “He remembers too often a happier

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