Importance of the concept of h
Importance of the concept of h"Home is where the heart is" .Discuss in relationship to the seafarer.
This is an interesting concept to apply to The Seafarer, whose narrator seems to feel a sense of belonging whilst travelling the sea despite the fact that he is obviously disillusioned with its hardships .The main character undergoes a transformation in what he considers home and this dramatically affects his life and lifestyle. Towards the end of The Seafarer the poet forces us to consider our mortality, and seems to push the notion that life is just a journey and that we will not truly be at home until we are with God .
The first instance of a sense of home in this poem comes with the description of the former life of the narrator in his pre-seafaring days. He leaves his old life for some unspecified reason, telling us that he was "cut off from his kinsmen", and he talks about this with a definite sense of regret and loss. Winter on the sea is presented as an "exile" or "wr�can"1 , a form of punishment where someone is forced to leave their homeland, the place where they belong. It seems that in the early stages of the poem the seafarer identifies his life with his kinsmen on land as his home, the place that he belongs.
At first he does not seem content with his seafaring life. During the early descriptions of his time there, it is painted as a life of hardship and penance. Images and adjectives of the sea and life there are harsh and foreboding-"ice cold", "hung round with icicles" , "fettered with frost". The sea is seen as cold, and not just in the physical sense .It is remote, a place of despair , an earthly purgatory, where there is "always anxiety …. as to what the Lord will bestow on him"2. The narrator is cut away from the comforts of human companionship and his former life and home. He learns to take his pleasure in nature and the natural , such as the song of the swan(ylfete song) 3, but he implies that these are not conventional pleasures and that the "normal" man would not be able to fathom the harshness of the seafaring lifestyle .
Over time he has come to identify himself with the sea , and has found a new sense of exhilaration and a different purpose for his existence there. Whatever the reason for his initial departure from land , he no longer seems to acknowledge that as his home and this is noticeable to the reader (the poem was to be given the editorial name The Seafarer , a name where the narrators identity is inextricably linked to the sea). Despite its dangers, he informs us that he constantly feels a longing to return to the waves when he is on land4, and there is a definite sense that he feels at home there, even with its lack...
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