The Meaning of Home in The Sailor It is important to consider the meaning of home when analyzing The Sailor. The narrator of this poem seems to feel a sense of belonging as he travels across the sea despite being obviously disillusioned by his hardships. The main character undergoes a transformation in what he considers home and this dramatically affects his life and lifestyle. Towards the end of The Seafarer the poet forces us to consider our mortality and seems to push the idea that life is just a journey and that we will not truly be home until we are with God. The first example of a sense of home in this poem the description of the narrator's previous life in his pre-sailing days is given. He leaves his old life for some unspecified reason, telling us that he has been "cut off from his relatives," and speaks of it with a clear sense of regret and loss. Winter on the sea is presented as an "exile" or "wræcan"1, a form of punishment by which someone is forced to leave their homeland, the place where they belong. It seems that in the early stages of the poem the seafarer identifies his life with his relatives on land as his home, the place where he belongs. At first he doesn't seem satisfied with his life as a sailor. During the first descriptions of his stay there, it is depicted as a life of hardship and penance. Images and adjectives of the sea and life are harsh and disturbing: "cold as ice", "hung with icicles", "chained by frost". The sea is seen as cold, and not just in a physical sense. It is remote, a place of desperation, an earthly purgatory, where there is "always the anxiety... of what the Lord will give him"2. The narrator is cut off from comforts... middle of paper... angels"6. Whatever home we build for ourselves on Earth, we must keep in perspective that it is only temporary. To conclude, there are two main representations and opposing aspects of home presented in this poem, from what is seen as the "norm", the narrator's life on land, to the "favoured", the narrator's life at sea, which is irrevocably linked to the lifestyle and it should not just be where the heart is (although there is a sense that our "heart's contentment" is important) but it should be, more importantly, a place where we can live a life that will take us to heaven , which the poem describes as our eternal home. The Seafarer is a poem that urges us to "consider carefully where we have our home, and then think how to get there." , fifth edition 1992, Blackwell. Publishers, Oxford .