Home Sweet Home: Exile & Elements of a home in Ann Stafford’s “The Wife’s Lament” and Charles Kennedy’s “The Wanderer” Ideally home is a place where one would cherish, a place of comfort and security. Now, picture one not having the protections that a home would require. During, the Anglo Saxon time period, home was desolate, isolated and often times lacked protection. Is it impossible to live a life at sea or in the woods? Readers experience the lonely and exile in the Anglo Saxon pomes translated by Ann Stafford in “The Wife’s Lament” and Charles W. Kennedy’s “The Wanderer” through the element of home. The wife and the wanderer have similar feeling of abandonment and exile due to loss. The wife is a woman who knows longer enjoys freedom she feels she had as a young girl, safe and secure in a home. “The Wife Lament”, the speaks movingly about loneliness, due to the speaker projecting the lonesomeness of the women who was exiled from society. The woman in the poem has been exiled from her husband and everything she love. In the wanderer, a man loses his lord and he became devastate.
In “The Wife’s Lament”, the reader finds a woman who is lonely and abandoned. The wife state “I had few loved ones in this land/ or faithful friends for this my heart grieves (line 16-17). She been abandoned and turn against by her love ones. The wife says “Ever I know/ the dark of my exile in (line5). She has been put a place where no one can get her out of the exile she been put thought. In (line27-28) ‘The man sent me out to line in the woods/ under an oak tree in this den in the earth. Her husband banishes her form their home. To the point that her home became the wood and the reader can see the wife is not happy about her surroundings. Now, she is lost with no true idea of a home. The readers are introduced to another poem where someone loses their lord and the poem grants an insight into the mind of a man who is physically and spiritually an outsider.
“The Wanderer”, is full of pain, sadness and sorrow of a man. The man state “When the earth covered my dear lords’/ face and I sailed away with sorrowful heart (line21-22). He lose his lord the alone person he looked up too. In (line28-29) “When friends are no more, his forture is exile/ no gifts of fine old a heart that is frozen. That mean no one or materials things can replace his lord. His home structure he state “Though woefully toiling on wintry seas with cherring oar in the icy wave, homeies
