We have changed our privacy policy. In addition, we use cookies on our website for various purposes. By continuing on our website, you consent to our use of cookies. You can learn about our practices by reading our privacy policy.

The Wanderer Transience Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Line).

Quote #1

He remembers hall-warriors and treasure-taking,
how among youth his gold-friend
received him at the feast. Joy has all perished!
(35-37)

Memory plays an important role in the awareness of transience. Only through a comparison with past – where hall-warriors feasted and received treasure – and the empty present does the speaker become aware of how much has disappeared, and with that, the joy that once existed.

Quote #2

. . . I know not, throughout this world,
why thought in my mind does not grow dark
when the life of men I fully think through,
how they suddenly abandoned the hall,
headstrong retainers. This Middle-Earth
each of all days so fails and falls . . .
(59-64)

The abandonment of the hall here is either a metaphor for death or a literal description of exile. Exile and death are similar in the way in which both end the presence of a person in a particular place – with death, in a human body on earth; with exile, in a community. Both death and exile remind the speaker of transience, how the earth "fails and falls."

Quote #3

A wise man perceives how ghastly it will be
when all this world's weal desolate stands.
(74-75)

The word translated here as "ghastly," gastlice, means both "ghost-like" and "awful" in Old English. It's a pun that expresses both the terribleness inherent in a deserted, abandoned earth, and the absence of the human souls whose memories now haunt it like ghosts.