The Wanderer And The Wife's Lament '

Mysterious poems without known authors can be very intriguing. The wife's Lament, translated by Alfred David, can be classified as one of these poems. The poem is dated back to the middle ages mainly because of the way the poem was written and the cultural references within the poem. The poem is about a woman that is lamenting over her husband who abandoned her and put her into a position where she has to live in the wilderness alone. The Wife's Lament is an exemplary poem that contains an immense number of themes about exile, an interesting choice of imagery and a strong character progression. Firstly, The Wife's Lament is filled with evidence that supports the main theme to be related to exile. The speaker constantly refers to being
In both of these poems the protagonists are in a position where they are in a position where they have to be alone. Additionally, the two poems share a common mindset, tone, and progression. For example in The Wanderer the protagonist speaks about a time when he was happy in the past but is no longer in a point of time where he is happy (lines 19-44). Similarly, in The Wife’s Lament the protagonist speaks of a time when she loved her husband (lines
In this 54 lined poem, 15 lines are dedicated to the description of the speaker’s home and surroundings. The speaker describes her home as a cave in a grove under an oak tree (lines 27-8). Although the actual description of the speaker’s home is rather simple, the speaker afterwards does start describing her surroundings which starts to help understand how sorrowful the wife actually is. In her descriptions she uses depressing adjectives such as dark dales, high dunes, and overgrown briers to stress the depression she is feeling (lines 30-3). The dark description used to describe the speaker's surroundings show that the speaker is not in a stable state of mind. According to a study done on depressed patient word choice it is shown that there are "decrements in the detection of positive" words in depressed patients (Atchley). Because of this someone could tell that the speaker is in a depressed frame of mind which makes the speakers reliability questionable. All of the interesting imagery used by the speaker allows the reader to look further into the poem and question the reliability of the speaker. Finally, the poem has a strong character development of the protagonist who is also the speaker. In the poem the protagonist begins in a state of love for her husband to such a great degree that she follows her husband after he departed across seas (lines 6-14). However, by the end of