Compare the elegies “The Seafarer” and “The Wife’s Lament.” Discuss the personal experience each poem presents and the speaker’s attitude toward the experience. What similarities and differences do you find?
        In “The Seafarer”, this old sailor has spent many a winters on the seas. In my opinion, it seems as though he goes out to sea to think things over. Also, it seems lik he doesn’t want to take the easy way out, but do things the hard way, not for pleasure and fun, but for the better. In “The Wife’s Lament”, the wife of a husband gets exiled from her tribe as soon as her husband, ‘the leader’, gets called off to fight. They shove her into the forest in a little burrow. Now that her husband’s gone, they pretty much do what they please with her. Some similarities between the two elegies are that they’re both set in a sorrowful and mournful tone. Also, both speak of God and how He controls the Earth. Some differences are that the first elegy tells of a tale of a ‘lost’ man who’s unsure of what he wants to do, whereas the other elegy tells of a woman who is succumbed to exile without the aid of her husband.