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Examples Of Transcendence In The Wanderer And The Seafarer

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Godden and Lapidge (180) suggest that “loss, suffering and morality” are all common tropes of vernacular poems thus the Lif is lane motif or life is transitory theme permeates old English poetry. Transience can be defined as the fact of nothing lasting forever or the instability of the world, whilst transcendence can be defined as one moving beyond or rising above. This essay will explore the themes of transience and transcendence in the battle poem Brunanbruh and the elegies The Wanderer and The Seafarer. The theme of transience can be seen in the poems when the speakers express their sadness and isolation due to their losses and long for the past. Whereas transcendence is evident as the speakers move beyond their losses and engage psychologically …show more content…

The harshness of live out at sea compared to on land reflects the stress The Seafarer faces in trying to find oneself, whereas life on land can be associated with enclosure which in turn brings comfort compared to life on the sea, which inflicts discomfort due to the unpredictability of nature. Waller (27-56) writes about how The Wanderer is strongly focused on the mind as a traumatic place due to the exile it recounts. Waller suggests that the mind leaves the body in The Seafarer. This reinforces the idea of the sea as a metaphor for the mind, as it moves away from the body causing chaos and destruction as one is disconnected. He suggests how during the Anglo Saxon period poems uses a wide range of vocabulary as a metaphor for the mind, how the mind was a place to store unhappy thoughts, and also refers to lines of the poem where the speaker “expresses a strong desire to keep his thoughts to himself as he struggles with the miserable condition of exile” (Waller, 30), thus suggests the mind can be associated with physical attachment. Thus the journey through the sea is an example of

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