ENG 2105 Lecture Notes - Elegy, Geats, Hygelac
Document Summary
Poem features a series of shifts back and forth in perspective. The voice moves in and out between present and past (dream state in wanderer and imaginative leaps in ruin) The ways that lament is structured in the poem is similar. Organic prosperous past and a present of exile, poverty, and the disintegration. The voice is alone in the present in both cases. Wanderer mixes germanic poetic themes (the raven, the eagle, and the wolf) The wanderer speaks with a narrator commenting on the narrator, and as the wanderer laments a third voice appears (imagining what the person contemplating a ruined wall would say) Fits into a category of meditative poems. This is the condition of the wise and the life in middle earth (not the water and not the sky) The condition is that life is temporal and has chronological qualities. All of the things that we seek and long for.
