The Seafarer (poem)

Gustavo Courbet's painting titled Waves and depicting rolling, foamy, sea-green waves crashing on water and rocks.
A stark depiction of the sea's beauty and instability

The Seafarer is an Old English poem giving a first-person account of a man alone on the sea. The poem consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word "Amen". It is recorded only at folios 81 verso – 83 recto[1] of the tenth-century[2] Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It has most often, though not always, been categorised as an elegy, a poetic genre commonly assigned to a particular group of Old English poems that reflect on spiritual and earthly melancholy.

  1. ^ Chambers, R W; Förster; Flower (1933). The Exeter book of Old English poetry. London: Printed and pub. for the dean and chapter of Exeter cathedral by P. Lund, Humphries & co., ltd.
  2. ^ Fell, Christine (2007). "Perceptions of Transience". In Godden, Malcolm; Lapidge, Michael (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 172–89. ISBN 978-0-521-37794-2.