The Wanderer

“The Seafarer” by Anonymous (10th century)

Collected in the Exeter Book, this Old English poem echoes the themes of The Wanderer and is most likely the original work of The Wanderer’s compiler. Because of its much later composition, however, the poem, which focuses on a warrior who faces the challenges of the open sea, finds purpose and reassuring hope in his faith in the Christian God.

“The Wanderer” by W. H. Auden (1930)

Drawing on the template of The Wanderer, Auden highlights the Medieval poem’s sense of spiritual isolation and free-floating anxiety. “Doom,” the poem opens, “is dark” (Line 1). The tormented heroic central figure is on a voyage and dreams of the home and family he might never again see.

“The Wanderer” by Seamus Heaney (1977)

A prose poem composed by the Irish Nobelist, the text recounts the story of a promising student of literature who receives a generous scholarship that marks his moment to depart his home and begin his own life of exploration abroad. The poem draws on the Wanderer’s emotional exile-state. It focuses on the unsettling movement out and away into bleak “migrant solitude.”