The Seafarer Themes

The speaker of "The Seafarer" is pretty darn lonely and miserable out there all by himself on the cold ocean. So why, then, does he spend most of his life there? Because his soul is overcome by a c...

"The Seafarer" begins with an account of a harrowing journey over a winter seascape, in which the speaker endures the physical effects of winter's cold and the psychological effects of anguish and...

The seascape through which the speaker of "The Seafarer" travels is as dark and stormy as his thoughts. And that's kind of the point – the natural world acts as a kind of mirror of the speaker's...

"The Seafarer" presents two somewhat contradictory conceptions of God. On the one hand, God is similar to the Anglo-Saxon idea of fate – a vaguely ominous force that determines the outcome of eve...

In "The Seafarer," the speaker only talks about aging for a brief ten lines. Nevertheless, it strikes us as a key theme because it represents just how fleeting life on earth can be. Aging becomes a...