Analysis of "The Seafarer" by Ezra Pound

Before Ezra Pound wrote his “The Seafarer,” a poem with the same name was written, serving as one of the four surviving manuscripts of Old English Poetry. This poem is about a seafarer expresses his sadness over the lonely lifestyle of a sailor while out at sea. Ezra Pound’s poem seems to be his own modern version of the very same poem; his begins with a disclaimer in parentheses that reads “From the early Anglo-Saxon text.” “The Seafarer” by Ezra Pound is told from the point of view of a seafarer, who evaluates his life while chronicling the desolate hardships he has faced on the cold sea and describes his anxious feelings and evaluating his life as he has lived it. The seafarer communicates the anxious feelings and the solitude of life on the wintry sea in relation to the more tempered life lived by those on land.

            Pound’s interpretation of the Old English poem was first published in 1911, and then again in Ripostes in 1912. Notable elements of the poem are frequent alliteration, old English diction, and themes of life, death, and struggle. The seafarer expresses his despair and isolation at being out at sea, which is cold and eerie – “Coldly afflicted,/ My feet were by frost benumbed./ Chill its chains are; chafing sighs/ Hew my heart round and hunger begot./ Mere-weary mood.” In this passage we see the alliteration, which runs frequently throughout the poem about every 5 lines, and the way in which the seafarer has been beaten down by the extreme and taxing nature of the sea.

Talking about himself, the seafarer compares his state to that of the people on land. Others who are not in his situation are “on dry land loveliest liveth” and act ignorantly to how much worse off the seafarers are. They “weathered the winter” and are “deprived of [their] kinsmen.” The use of the word “kinsmen” here by Pound is similar to the usage of the word in another of Pound’s poem titled “In Durance.” In that poem, Pound repeats the line “I am homesick after mine own kind” and uses the word “kin” to describe people he sees as similar to him, or perhaps just the speaker, though he somewhat explicitly writes that he is homesick for his own kind that “have some breath for beauty and the arts.” Because “In Durance” was also one of Ezra Pound’s early poems, it is possible that Pound was referencing his other poem when writing that the seafarer was deprived of his kinsmen.

Throughout the middle of the poem, there is frequent imagery of a ship stuck in a stormy, cold sea and the way that the speaker sees life as filled with death and dreariness – “My lord deems to me this dead life/ On loan and on land.” The speaker then begins to talk about wealth and rich men, and how although during their lifetime they may be powerful and influential, when they die their wealth cannot aid their state of lifelessness. When rich men die of disease, they make promises in their last word so that “all men shall honour him after.” However, when they finally go to rest in their tomb, all of the gold strewn around their bodies doesn’t make them any less dead. This segment at the end seems to be a thought that the seafarer might be using to make him feel better about his own state of being and, make him realize that even though he may be out at sea and separate from his kin, he is still filled with life, unlike some of the great men of history who have to lay dead in their lavish tombs.