Lyric features in the Old English Seafarer

In the Old English poetic corpus, the lyric persona was used with relative flexibility even within the confines of the prevailing poetic traditions. In particular, The Seafarer, a poem conventionally ascribed to the ‘elegiac’ genre, is a fictional first-person account of the physical and mental tribulations of an exile sailing on a stormy sea. Containing echoes of heroic, homiletic, and eschatological themes, the seafarer’s journey has been variously interpreted in an allegorical metaphorical light. This paper aims to investigate The Seafarer as a lyric poem, approached through its non-narrative elements, images and rhetorical strategies defining the emotional experience of the speaker.