Within The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament, the pain of exile and separation results in feelings of sorrow and of longing for the ignorant blissfulness of the past and the hope the future contains. The differences in the speakers’ mindsets, circumstances that brought their exile, and their gender leads to the diverse interpretations of the speakers’ final conclusions in their exile or journey.
Time in isolation leaves both speakers the desire to return to a happy time with their former lord and a contempt of the world where they were forced to preside in after their banishment. Both speakers longed for a lord. The woman in The Wife’s Lament longed for happier days with her husband, also called her lord. The man cast as an exile in The Wanderer …show more content…
This is a self-reference elegy and only has one speaker—the wife. The circumstances of her exile lie in a forest location where she shelters in a cave instead of on the sea. According to her while her lord commanded her exile, her lord’s kinsmen wanted to separate them and she suggests that she is in the kinsmen’s land under their watch. She realizes that her husband is trying to hide that he is plotting a murder from her, which adds to their separation, leaving her with no one to rely on. Throughout her exile where she is stuck in “a home without joy,” she imagines others who are happy with their friends or lovers as she sits miserable and crying in the summer day (32). Even though she is sorrowful about her exile and aloneness, she produces a curse-like ending that angrily calls for her husband to suffer the way she has suffered in by herself and outlawed. The final line “woe to the one who must wait with longing for a loved one” represents her own struggle with the grief of her lost loved one (53). While her husband did not die, the distance that was created when he changed his character into a more sinister person is like the person she loved being gone, never to return. This is also a warning to those in love that if they were to lose their love as she had, then they are going to suffer like they were an outcast as
Time in isolation leaves both speakers the desire to return to a happy time with their former lord and a contempt of the world where they were forced to preside in after their banishment. Both speakers longed for a lord. The woman in The Wife’s Lament longed for happier days with her husband, also called her lord. The man cast as an exile in The Wanderer …show more content…
This is a self-reference elegy and only has one speaker—the wife. The circumstances of her exile lie in a forest location where she shelters in a cave instead of on the sea. According to her while her lord commanded her exile, her lord’s kinsmen wanted to separate them and she suggests that she is in the kinsmen’s land under their watch. She realizes that her husband is trying to hide that he is plotting a murder from her, which adds to their separation, leaving her with no one to rely on. Throughout her exile where she is stuck in “a home without joy,” she imagines others who are happy with their friends or lovers as she sits miserable and crying in the summer day (32). Even though she is sorrowful about her exile and aloneness, she produces a curse-like ending that angrily calls for her husband to suffer the way she has suffered in by herself and outlawed. The final line “woe to the one who must wait with longing for a loved one” represents her own struggle with the grief of her lost loved one (53). While her husband did not die, the distance that was created when he changed his character into a more sinister person is like the person she loved being gone, never to return. This is also a warning to those in love that if they were to lose their love as she had, then they are going to suffer like they were an outcast as