Poems which express feelings of mourning and lament are known as elegies. In these poems, the speaker usually speaks of all they have lost. The poem “The Wife’s Lament” is an elegiac poem because of the character’s circumstance and the tone of the poem.
The wife’s painful circumstances in “The Wife’s Lament” is a trait found within all elegiac poems. Towards the very beginning of the poem, the wife starts telling the story of why she is now in exile alone. It appears that she was peace-weaver, a woman who is married off in order to stop the fighting between two families; however, this plan did not work. “I must endure without end the misery of exile… my lord departed from his people over tossing waves; I worried when day came in what land
The wife’s painful circumstances in “The Wife’s Lament” is a trait found within all elegiac poems. Towards the very beginning of the poem, the wife starts telling the story of why she is now in exile alone. It appears that she was peace-weaver, a woman who is married off in order to stop the fighting between two families; however, this plan did not work. “I must endure without end the misery of exile… my lord departed from his people over tossing waves; I worried when day came in what land