Response To The Seafarer

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The Seafarer: Response to Literature “The Seafarer” is an Old English poem told from the first-person point of view. In the story, the main character, an old seafarer, is reminiscing his life. He describes everything he went through and all the feelings he had on the lonely sea and the land. The themes of the story is religion, word choice, and literal view. The poem is often noticed as a penitential exile; however, some argue that if the Seafarer was a religious exile, why weren’t the “joys of the spirit” mentioned. John C. Pope and Stanley Greenfield have argued about what the word sylf means in the poem. The poem has a detailed description of the voyages without much of a figurative meaning, justifying it’s about a literal penitential

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