Birds as Communities in <i>The Wanderer</i> and <i>The Seafarer</i>

The presence of the Christian bird-as-soul motif in The Wanderer and The Seafarer offers an important social frame for interpreting each speaker’s response to exile. The birds in these two poems become metaphorical communities of souls for the isolated speakers by evoking the bird-as-soul tradition. In approaching or imitating the birds who now swim and fly alongside them, both poetic speakers seek inclusion in a new group, which may replace lost kin and companions. When The Wanderer is rejected by the birds who swim away from his advances, he encounters a judgment that The Seafarer is not forced to endure—and this rejection, I suggest, shapes the different characterizations of exile that occur in each poem. The birds’ treatment of each poetic speaker reveals that the two exiles react, not antithetically, but in fact identically to social isolation—because The Seafarer is not alone, and The Wanderer is.