The Wife's Lament Analysis

When translating any poem from one language to another, it is very difficult to preserve both meaning and form. This situation is not helped by the fact that the original language here is the insan...

We are first clued into the identity of the speaker from the title. But we can infer her gender from pronoun usage and syntax within the first several lines. By line 5 we know the cause of her sorr...

We know that the Exeter Book dates back to somewhere between 960 and 990 CE. And we know "The Wife's Lament," as a poem found within this text, must be at least that old. This chronology gives us s...

For starters, Old English has a very unique sound. It's guttural and percussive, and very distinctive. Just listen to this reading of "The Wife's Lament," and you'll see what we mean. Old English p...

The title here sets the table for the poem. It gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect in the poem and clues us in to both the speaker and her tone. All of this is pretty much confirmed in th...

Gee, that Anonymous person sure writes a lot—very prolific, indeed. Okay, all kidding aside, we don't actually know who wrote "The Wife's Lament." But we can recognize a similar poetic style pres...

This is no walk on the beach. The plot doesn't make sense. The diction is weird. And yeah, it's written in a dead language. Of course, in order to get the most out of the poem, you must delve into...

You can go see the home of the Exeter Book in person. It's currently kept at the Exeter Cathedral library in the city of Exeter, England—where it's been for nearly 950 years. (Source.) Old Englis...

Our speaker has been deprived of her loved one. At "uhtceare," she feels the consequences of this deprivation acutely. Now, we wonder, did her husband die? Or is she just sexually frustrated, in th...

Later on in the Exeter Book there's another poem called "The Husbands Message." This poem is written from the perspective from a husband to his wife or betrothed, who is far away in another land. I...