The Wanderer and the Legacy of Pathetic Fallacy

Abstract

The Old English poem known as The Wanderer has long been said to rely on the device of ‘pathetic fallacy’ in its descriptions of stormy and frozen land- and seascapes. This piece of literary-critical terminology has strong ties to both Romantic and realist aesthetic ideals of the nineteenth century, and this paper outlines the assumptions which underpin the term and questions our continued use of it when discussing The Wanderer. By pointing us towards the external world as a projection of the interior psychological world of the ‘wanderer’ figure, the term obscures two key features of the text. Firstly, the label sweeps to the side the literal significance of the material world to which the poem’s central speaker responds, despite the fact that this landscape bears marks of divine anger and potency and seems to participate in the Augustinian tradition of the degraded Sixth Age of the World. Secondly, the term points us towards a dramatic characterisation of a single heroic-age nobleman in a manner that the text is itself relatively uninterested in pursuing, instead emphasising conditions of exile, isolation, and despair as universalised spiritual problems. Seeing this poem as governed by pathetic fallacy distracts us from such facets, when other interpretive frameworks have more to offer.

Introduction

This article examines the concept of ‘pathetic fallacy’ as it intertwines with the critical history of the Old English poem The Wanderer, which survives in the late tenth-century Exeter Book but may have been composed in the eighth or ninth century (Fulk, 1992, pp. 12–13; Leslie 1985, pp. 47–48). It questions our continued use of this well-established literary-critical catchword when analysing this short meditative poem and its tradition, arguing that in its basic presumptions it misdirects us. I begin by surveying the meaning and history of the term and its role in scholarship on The Wanderer, before highlighting the ways in which it leads us to approach the poem in a mode rooted in nineteenth-century critical theory, encouraging us to overlook key features of the text.

These sidelined features fall into two main areas. On the one hand, the term distracts from the poem’s keen interest in a legible material world which bears the marks of divine anger and which seems to be declining in its old age.¹ On the other hand, the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ obscures the fact that from the very beginning of the text, its central exiled figure is presented by the poet as embodying a spiritual predicament experienced by many. Analysis along the lines of ‘pathetic fallacy’ tends to emphasise how the natural imagery of the poem points us towards the temperament and mindset of a specific individual of the heroic age, converting from paganism to Christianity. The reputation of this text as a ‘dramatic monologue’, a genre term which also has its roots in nineteenth-century aesthetic ideals, likewise creates additional problems by directing us towards characterisation as the primary goal of the poet.

To problematise the inherited terminology of pathetic fallacy and the dramatic monologue in their application to The Wanderer is therefore to reckon not only with the influence of nineteenth-century Romanticism on Old English studies (on which see previously Mora, 1995; Frantzen & Venegoni, 1986; Frantzen, 1990; Stanley, 1975; Bloomfield, 1986) but also that of realism. Both these well-worn pieces of critical terminology have close connections with the goal of psychological realism and novelistic expectations of character-building, which, I will argue, are at odds with the goals of The Wanderer, especially because the poem references multiple solitary figures who are ostensibly distinct, on a grammatical level at least (ll. 1a, 6a, 29b, 65b). We are on firmer ground in describing The Wanderer as a lyric, because this leaves space for the poem’s staging of a spiritual situation to which many are vulnerable, rather than an articulation of the mentality of a particular dramatic character.² Building on scholarship both old and new, I will contest that ‘pathetic fallacy’ has yielded all it can, and this term is best set aside in favour of terminology that allows for the significance of the poem’s material world on its own terms, and its depiction of a plurality of solitary figures experiencing the same spiritual plight.

‘Pathetic fallacy’: Historical and Contemporary Usage

The meaning of the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ has long been fraught and unstable, for all that it is commonly deployed casually. It was first used by the art and social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) to underpin a theory outlined in a single chapter of the third volume of his Modern Painters (1856). He invented the phrase to refer to the propensity of violent emotions to distort a mind’s impression of the natural world and produce ‘false appearances’, ‘entirely unconnected with any real power […] in the object, and only imputed to it by us’ (pp. 158–159). At points, Ruskin’s use of the label leans towards the pejorative, as he declares that it is only a ‘second order’ of poets who enjoy including such ‘falseness’ in their work, singling out Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson as examples: these poets ‘feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly’ (p. 163). At other times, he speaks more softly of the device, acknowledging such fallacies can be pleasing when informed by the genuinely heightened feeling of the poet or—crucially—a character they construct. Such ambiguities in Ruskin’s theory have led later scholars to stress its highly complex and at times perplexing nature, ‘so suggestive and at the same time so confusing’, as Morton remarked in 1900 (p. 63).

Over the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Ruskin’s theory evolved in multiple directions. Particularly conspicuous was its transformation into a rather blunt critical tool commonly used to denounce any kind of personification of natural phenomena or objects. Critics opted to ‘abstract an equivocal notion of the pathetic fallacy as a stylistic blemish, of the general order of mixed metaphors in heinousness or veniality’ (Thomas, 1961, p. 347). At the same time, Ruskin’s theory seems to have had some impact on the development of various strands of more prestigious literary theory, not least—as Earnhardt has argued—through possibly influencing George Santayana’s theory of ‘correlative objects’ and thereby the ‘objective correlative’ theorised by T. S. Eliot (Santayana’s student at Harvard), which he defined as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of [a] particular emotion’ (1920, p. 100). Eliot may owe a debt to Ruskin’s view of the potential of ‘pathetic fallacy’ to allow expression of emotional and psychological realities—at the very least, the theories share a great deal.³

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ has possessed a kind of neutrality that is perhaps better termed ambivalence, given that its pejorative associations still surface with some frequency.⁴ Its omnipresence as a stock phrase in critical and pedagogical contexts was mourned in 1961 by one critic, who declared ‘[e]very schoolboy, certainly every schoolmaster, can facilely explain the term’ (Thomas, p. 342). Today, its popularity in pedagogical contexts appears undiminished—it surfaces, for instance, as an entry in an encyclopedia addressed to primary school teachers in the UK, where it is defined as ‘the attribution of human feelings and characteristics to animals, plants and inanimate objects as a poetic device […, s]ometimes applied pejoratively to the overblown or inappropriate use of personification’ (Mallett, 2017, p. 337). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics closes its entry on the term by observing an ‘overall weariness […] in contemporary usage’ (Burris 2012, p. 1010, contraction expanded). No dedicated monograph has yet traced the history of the term across the almost two centuries of its currency, but a number of scholars have nonetheless made efforts to illuminate the history of this most ‘influential [and] controversial’ aspect of Ruskin’s literary criticism, tracing the various misunderstandings and appropriations it has encountered.⁵

‘Pathetic fallacy’: Relationship with The Wanderer

In the world of Old English scholarship, The Wanderer has long been held to rely on the device, particularly in its description of stormy weather, ‘typically interpreted’ as representative of ‘the miserable mental state’ of the ‘eard-stapa’ or ‘wanderer’ figure (Leneghan, 2016, pp. 124, 134; The Wanderer, ed. Leslie, 1985, l. 6a).⁶ Indeed, pathetic fallacy is often understood to be characteristic of the wider group of those Exeter Book poems populating the much-contested generic grou** of the ‘elegy’, including also The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Ruin, Deor, The Rhyming Poem and Resignation A and B. Stanley Greenfield, for instance, describes the weather and scenery of The Wanderer and The Seafarer as ‘an objective correlative for a state of mind called into being by mood’, drawing on the successor to pathetic fallacy posited by Eliot.⁷ When Lois Bragg surveys what she terms Old English lyric poems (including all the so-called ‘elegies’) she noted the ‘astonishing degree to which [they] employ personification and the pathetic fallacy’, further reinforcing this central tenet of scholarship on these texts (Bragg 1991, p. 26).

It is unsurprising that the concept of pathetic fallacy has formed such a major part of the critical history of the ‘elegies’, given that Ruskin coined the term to describe the technique of poets such as Coleridge, Keats, and Tennyson, key figures of the same literary and philosophical climate which originally shaped the construction of the Old English elegy as a genre. Indeed, Maria José Mora cites Coleridge’s own definition of the elegy as exemplifying the Romantic concept that was ‘basically’ the one used to give shape to the Old English genre in the nineteenth century, namely personal or sentimental poetry:

Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principle theme of elegy. Elegy presents everything as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice (Coleridge 1874, p. 294; Mora, 1995, p. 132)

The ultimate reference point of elegiac poetry must, according to this view, be the poet’s own emotional condition, not external entities.

Later, when nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars of Old English praise The Wanderer as an ‘elegy’, the influence of Romantic definitions like Coleridge’s is obvious. Stopford Brooke stressed that there is laudable close attention to nature in the poem, but was more impressed by the way that the poem’s natural scenes refer ultimately to the interior emotional state of the poet:

The Wanderer points to the tumbling waves and the sea-birds dip** and preening their feathers, and the wintry storms darkening the sky and binding the earth. […] And what is still more remarkable and modern, is that the natural objects are not always seen as they are, but as they seem to the mood of the poet. They are touched with his joy or gloomed with his misfortune (1892, p. 172; see further Mora, 1995, p. 137–138).

Later critics followed Brooke in parsing the natural imagery of The Wanderer as fundamentally representative of a mood, especially in the poem’s first half.⁸ At times, the label ‘pathetic fallacy’ is used with little elaboration, such that it is difficult to discern its meaning beyond denoting the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman phenomena. Nonetheless, scholars often seem alive to Ruskin’s more positive sense of the term in perceiving the poem’s wintry scenes to reflect authentically the emotional state of an individual, whether the poet himself or a constructed ‘wanderer’ character. Patrick Cook thus declares the pathetic fallacy to be ‘a well-recognized feature of the Anglo-Saxon sensibility’ but perceives a particular innovation in the Wanderer-poet’s use of the compound winter-cearig as a way of carrying the wanderer’s ‘self-bondage […] over to the external world’ (1996, p. 139). For Daniel Calder, it is a given that the ‘bleak winter landscapes’ of both The Wanderer and The Seafarer ‘symbolize the psychological states of the two narrators’, but he draws out a contrast between the more universalised second half of The Wanderer, and its first half, in which the ‘hostile seascape’ is ‘connected only to [the narrator’s] own state of mind’ (1971, p. 264). Greenfield similarly stresses an ‘obvious shift in focus from personal to impersonal concern’ at line 58, prior to which the winter imagery is ‘best taken metaphorically’ to ‘heighten the sense of isolation’ (1989, p. 99). As I will argue in this paper’s final section, this shift at line 58 may not be the dramatic change in direction that Greenfield, Calder, and many others perceive, depending on how we understand the implications of the poem’s earlier wintry imagery. But in the history of The Wanderer’s scholarship, the distinctly personal referent of the natural imagery of the first half of the poem has long been taken as read.

Scholars have sometimes presumed that the imagery points a reader towards the interior world of a personality while at the same time trying to refute another set of Romantic presumptions about Old English poetry: the ‘Gothick conception’ of the poets of the ‘Dark Ages’ as ‘sons of nature’ (Stanley 1955, p. 427).⁹ In 1955, E. G. Stanley made an intervention which questioned the validity of distinguishing too finely between symbolic and literal aspects of Old English poetry, but which ultimately advocated for interpreting the natural imagery of The Wanderer and other poems as strongly figurative. For Stanley, recognition of the figurative artistry of the poets is of great importance, especially given that scholars can mistake ‘how concretely the Anglo-Saxons interpreted allegory at times’ for a lack of figurative complexity. When it comes to natural imagery, the direction of the comparison is clear: ‘the processes of nature do not, as a rule, lead to thoughts, but rather they use the processes as symbols of moods: a concrete scene may be little more than a description of a mood’ (1955, pp. 424, 452).¹⁰ As such, Stanley’s assessment of the functioning of the natural scenes in The Wanderer does not substantially differ from Brooke’s, who likewise championed the primacy of ‘mood’ in the text. In arguing against one strand of criticism influenced by a Romantic ‘Gothick’ mode of viewing Old English poetry, Stanley embraces another.

Although a multitude of studies have detected pathetic fallacy in The Wanderer, voices of dissent have also surfaced in scholarship old and new (Hanscom, 1905, p. 462; Neville, 1999, pp. 48–51; Rozano-García 2019, p. 277; see also Tedford, 2012). The present study revisits these critiques and makes a new case for the unhelpfulness of the term in sha** our approach to the poem. I will advance two arguments for the redundancy of the concept of pathetic fallacy when applied to The Wanderer, as described above, broadly concerned with the material world and the speaker’s interior mental world respectively. Ultimately, although the idea of The Wanderer as a site of pathetic fallacy has yielded a wealth of valuable scholarship since the nineteenth century, we have arrived at a time when the term has given all it can give.

Challenging the Term’s Implications: Depictions of the Material World

This first step of my argument is one in which I unite and build on the insights of several previous critics who have already observed that in The Wanderer, natural phenomena seem to be situated prior to—and indeed inform—the reflections of its central speaker (see especially Tedford, 2012). Jennifer Neville (1999, pp. 48–51) and Francis Leneghan (2016, pp. 124, 134) have both questioned our use of the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ in relation to The Wanderer on these grounds. Neville argues for the natural world’s status as ‘amoral’, functioning primarily to highlight human powerlessness, but Leneghan stresses the close association between the tempestuous weather of The Wanderer and the anger and destructive power of God. As has long been appreciated, the poem’s natural imagery also communicates the aged quality of the world, understood to be in its final Sixth Age in Augustinian terms, as we will see. On a literal level, the material phenomena of this poem therefore work to prompt spiritual reflection rather than constituting a metaphorical representation of an interior emotional state.

For instance, in the following passage from relatively late in the poem, the coming of evening is accompanied by a wintry snowstorm. This storm is initially localised to some degree—it is sent from the north—but the passage moves towards wider reflections on the whole of the earth:

[…] þas stan-hleoþu stormas cnyssað;

hrið hreosende hrusan bindeð,

wintres woma,  þonne won cymeð,

nipeð niht-scua, norþan onsendeð

hreo hægl-fare hæleþum on andan.

Eall is earfoðlic eorþan rice;

onwendeð wyrda gesceaft weorold under heofonum.  (ll. 101–107)

[…] the storms strike the stone-slopes, the falling snowstorm fetters the ground, winter’s howling, when the darkness comes, the night-shadow deepens, from the north sends a fierce hail-shower, hostile to human beings. All is arduous in the kingdom of the earth; the course of fate alters the world under the heavens.

Neville has argued that ‘pathetic fallacy’ does not shape this passage, but this claim stems from her sense that ‘Old English poetry is rarely described as being in “sympathy” with human interests’, such that ‘it is probably more accurate to say that it is represented as standing in opposition to human interests’ in a manner ‘indifferent’ or even ‘hostile’ (1999, p. 49). She does consider, though, whether the poet’s suggestion that ‘þes middan-geard/ ealra dogra gehwam dreoseþ and fealleþ’ (‘each and every day this world declines and falls’, ll. 62b–63) might point us to the patristic tradition of the Ages of the World, offering an instructive comparison with a section of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos:

Leofan men, gecnawað þæt soð is: ðeos worold is on ofste, and hit nealæcð þam ende, and þy hit is on worolde aa swa leng swa wyrse; and swa hit sceal nyde for folces synnan ær Antecristes tocyme yfelian swyþe, and huru hit wyrþ þænne egeslic and grimlic wide on worolde (ed. Bethurum, 1957, p. 267).

Beloved men, know what is true: this world is in haste, and it approaches its end, and things in this world always are the worse the longer [they last], and it must necessarily grow much worse before the coming of the Antichrist because of the people’s sins, and indeed it will then be terrible and grim widely in the world (translation Neville’s, 1999 p. 50).

Neville argues that there is a key difference between the perspectives of Wulfstan and the Wanderer-poet, because the former ‘ascribes the present suffering to the unrighteous acts of the people’, while the latter suggests it is ‘not sinfulness, but the threat to survival in the hostile physical environment that motivates the seeking of God’ (1999, p. 50). The images of the inhospitable and declining world in The Wanderer do not, according to this view, carry inherently moral weight. Although it has met with some critiques (Knowles, 2019; Price, 2013, pp. 251–252), Neville’s account of the hostile relationship between humanity and the apathetic natural world in The Wanderer and beyond has enjoyed considerable traction (see, for example, Rozano-García 2019, p. 277).

Nonetheless, the various natural phenomena described in The Wanderer do point towards spiritual truth in complex ways, beyond indifference or hostility functioning to drive frightened humanity into the arms of God, as Tedford has explored. She stresses the importance of the central speaker’s process of scrutinising and witnessing the natural world, facilitating his progression from an-haga to snottor on mode: ‘it is the contemplation of the physical that leads [the speaker] to mental and spiritual wisdom’ (2012, p. 133). Tedford is not centrally concerned with the term ‘pathetic fallacy’, but her arguments offer a powerful interrogation of the label’s relevance to The Wanderer and other Old English poems, suggesting that ‘[l]andscape in Old English poetry cannot be dismissed as a mere experience of a “mood,” it must rather be understood as a carefully constructed setting that exerts its own influence over the mental state of the poem’s speakers’—in the specific case of The Wanderer, ‘the relationship between the interior “person” and the exterior “landscape” may be […] viewed as a two-way process, each influencing the other’ (2012, p. 136). It remains an open question what exactly the natural world prompts the central figure of The Wanderer towards, but Tedford helpfully gestures towards an almost scientific posture on the wanderer’s part: observing, noticing, and then drawing out implications. Indeed, this is closer to what Ruskin sees as the opposite of pathetic fallacy, namely the work of scrutinising nature with an effort towards objectivity, in a manner which enables perception of how nature might point towards the divine.

Equipped with this idea of the wanderer-as-witness, it becomes more possible for a reader to appreciate how the scenes of rough weather and icy waters are framed as direct interventions made by God. These interventions are made in a state of anger (most overtly at line 105b), but a kind of anger which overlaps with the more positive qualities of might and potency. Lending support to such an interpretive line, Francis Leneghan (2016, pp. 134–35) has noted a stream of parallels between The Wanderer and Isaiah 24. This chapter begins with the declaration ‘Ecce: Dominus dissipabit terram et nudabit eam et adfliget faciem eius et disperget habitatores eius’ (Behold: the Lord shall lay waste the earth and shall strip it and shall afflict the face thereof and scatter abroad the inhabitants thereof, 24.1), which resonates with almost every line of The Wanderer, but especially the description of exile at lines 1–11a and 19–24, as well as this scene of ruination:¹¹

Yþde swa þisne eard-geard  ælda scyppend

oþþæt, burg-wara  breahtma lease,

eald enta geweorc  idlu stodon […]

Eal þis eorþan gesteal  idel weorþeð! (ll. 85–87, 110)

The creator of men thus laid waste to this dwelling-place, until, lacking the noise of town-dwellers, the old work of giants stood idle […] All this earth’s foundation becomes idle!

Similarly sharing the concerns of this passage, Isaiah 24.3 asserts ‘Dissipatione dissipabitur terra, et direptione praedabitour, Dominus enim locutus est verbum hoc’ (With desolation shall the earth be laid waste, and it shall be utterly spoiled, for the Lord hath spoken this word), while 24.4 declares ‘Luxit et defluxit terra et infirmata est. Defluxit orbis […]’ (‘The earth mourned and faded away and is weakened. The world faded away’), paralleling the poem’s cry that ‘Swa þes middan-geard/ ealra dogra gehwam dreoseð ond fealleþ’ (‘So, each and every day, this world declines and falls’, ll. 63b–64, and see also 92–96). Later in the same biblical chapter, several verses mourn the departure of wine, song, and merriment in the city (24:7–11), lingering on the idea of the lost ‘sonitus laetantium’ (‘noise of them that rejoice’, 24:8) in a way that mirrors The Wanderer’s descriptions of the old works of giants lacking ‘burg-wara breahtma’ (‘the noise of town-dwellers’, ll. 86). The architectural imagery of the poem also finds a point of correspondence in Isaiah 24’s descriptions of urban decay, as ‘Relicta est in urbe solitudo’ (‘Desolation is left in the city’, 24:12). These parallels thus suggest the poet may be recalling the threats of devastation, powered by divine anger, of Isaiah 24.

Indeed, The Wanderer’s echoes of Isaiah spill out beyond chapter 24, including many verses in which divinely ordained destruction has already unfolded, rather than being situated in the future. We can look anew, for instance, at the hapax legomenon ‘eard-stapa’ (‘earth-stepper’, 6a) in the poem’s opening lines, which Leslie points out is an unusual form, given that other -stapa compounds in Old English poetry refer mainly to animals (1985, 70), by comparing the description of the afflictions of the people of Moab: ‘finitus est […] pulvis. Consummatus est miser; defecit qui conculcabat terram’ (‘the dust is at an end. The wretch is consumed; he hath failed, that trod the earth under foot’, Isaiah 16.4). Other possibly influential verses from other parts of Isaiah include the following reflections on the false comforts which come in dreams, to which we may compare lines 39–50a of The Wanderer, describing a solitary figure dreaming of embracing his lord and awaking in a condition of renewed longing:

Et sicuti somniat esuriens et comedit, cum autem fuerit expergefactus vacua est anima eius, et sicut somniat sitiens et bibit, et postquam fuerit expergefactus lassus adhuc sitit, et anima eius vacua est, sic erit multitudo omnium Gentium […]. (29.8)

And as he that is hungry dreameth and eateth, but when he is awake his soul is empty: and as he that is thirsty dreameth and drinketh and after he is awake is yet faint with thirst, and his soul is empty, so shall be the multitude of all the Gentiles […].

This verse does not specifically describe visions of loved ones, as in The Wanderer, but it does advance the idea that waking from dreams of satiety only heightens the bitterness of the loss. Moreover, while Isaiah 24 sets out the destructive power that God will unleash upon the sinful in the future, in other chapters the book stresses how such force has already been evidenced in the world. Harsh and wintry weather forms a central part of these articulations of divine potency and rage, suggesting a fine (perhaps non-existent) line between terror, power, and wonder:

Ecce: validus et fortis Dominus, sicut impetus grandinis, turbo confringens, sicut impetus aquarum multarum inundantium et emissarum super terram spatiosam. (28:2)

Behold: the Lord is mighty and strong, as a storm of hail, a destroying whirlwind, as the violence of many waters overflowing and sent forth upon a spacious land.

The tone of this verse borders on approving; use of violent force confers authority upon God, and the flood that is described seems to be impressive as well as destructive. The ability of the ruined natural world to signify both the power of God and the vulnerability and fallibility of humankind has implications for a great deal of Old English poetry, including The Wanderer. Accounts of the poem frequently focus on its conception of lamentable worldly transience (see e.g. Fell, 2013), but in narrating scenes of extraordinary destruction, the poem may work to signal the respect God is owed, too.

This section has focused largely on the latter stages of the text, but when, earlier in the poem, a solitary figure sees ‘hreosan hrim ond snaw, hagle gemenged’ (‘frost and snow fall, mingled with hail’, l. 48), or even when the poem's initial an-haga traverses a ‘hrim-cealde sæ’ (‘ice cold sea’, l. 4b), in a condition of being ‘winter-cearig’ (l. 24a), we should remain alert to the associations with punitive and awe-inspiring divine violence that bad weather—and hail particularly—have in Isaiah and the Bible more widely. This is not to close off all the various semantic and symbolic possibilities which accrue around lines like this. The description of the mingled frost, snow, and hail, for instance, may be appreciated as an image of indistinction which resonates with the wanderer’s own sense of social dissolution, in the same way that the ‘brim-fuglas’ (‘sea-birds’, l. 47a), inherently hybrid creatures, are said to bathe at the surface of the waters (46–47) rather than occupying one realm or the other. Nonetheless, the scriptural traditions of divinely mandated destruction manifesting as wintry weather should be considered a possible context for the poem’s natural scenes, even in the text’s earliest stages.

Reading The Wanderer against Isaiah points us towards the significance of the poem’s hostile natural conditions and bad weather as material phenomena, contemplation of which facilitates spiritual growth, as their strength is ultimately an index of the fearsome power of God. This implication may become more explicit as the poem develops, but it is present to some degree throughout, and the extent to which this is truly a text of two halves, as is so often claimed, will be addressed more fully in this article’s next section. For now, I wish to stress that by casting away the term ‘pathetic fallacy’, we are more able to perceive how the poem’s primary speaker might be meaningfully responding to the physical world as spiritual prompt, as a landscape on which divine anger and power is etched, rather than projecting his personal mood onto a natural setting.

When navigating this poem’s natural imagery, in addition to bearing in mind the close scriptural associations between rough weather and divine strength and rage, one can also keep in sight the importance of ideas of the world ages inherited by early medieval literary culture. This intellectual tradition has already been mentioned above in connection with Neville’s suggestion of the relevance of Wulfstan’s reflections, but a number of other scholars have previously engaged with this intellectual background to the text (including Smithers, 1957, 1959; Calder, 1971, p. 272; Green, 1975, p. 504; see also Cross, 1963). The poet of The Wanderer explicitly connects the future threat of the world’s destruction to the current destruction being wreaked upon land and sea, and thereby indicates a cumulative disintegration along the lines of the final world ages:

Ongietan sceal gleaw hæle hu gæstlic bið

þonne eall þisse worulde wela weste stondeð,

swa nu missenlice geond þisne middan-geard

winde biwaune weallas stondaþ,

hrime bihrorene, hryðge þa ederas. (ll. 73–77)

A clear-thinking man must apprehend how fearsome [/spiritual] it will be when all the wealth of this world stands as waste, as now diversely throughout this earth walls stand blustered by wind, coated in frost, the enclosures storm-beaten.

Yþde swa þisne eard-geard ælda scyppend

oþþæt, burg-wara breahtma lease,

eald enta geweorc idlu stodon. (ll. 85–87)

[....] The creator of men thus laid waste to this dwelling-place, until, lacking the noise of town-dwellers, the old work of giants stood idle.

Particularly in the second passage, the speaker indicates a continuum between the present and future, with this distinction made all the murkier by the Old English language’s lack of a distinct future tense. Certainly, the Sixth Age of world history should be understood as a continuum which connects the present with the future, as Bede sees it, following Augustine:

Cuius diei uesperam iam nunc adpropinquare cernimus, cum, abundante per omnia iniquitate refrigescit caritas multorum. Adueniet autem multo tenebrosior ceteris (In Genesim, ed. Jones, 1967, I, ii.iii, pp. 38–39, ll. 1193–1196).

Even now we see the evening of this day approaching, when, with iniquity abounding everywhere, the charity of many grows cold. Its advent, moreover, will be darker by far than [the evenings of the other ages] (trans. Kendall, 2008, p. 104).

The Sixth Age is, moreover, a time shaped by ‘God’s displeasure’ (Kendall, 2008, p. 15), manifesting in plague, war, and famine, and thus an escalation of the disorderly elements of the previous world epoch:

Quinta deinde usque ad aduentum Saluatoris in carnem generationisbus et ipsa .xiiii., porro annis .dlxxxviiii., extenta, in qua, ut graui senetute fessa, malis crebrioribus plebs Hebraea quassatur. Sexta, quae nunc agitur, nulla generationum uel temporum serie certa sed, ut aetas decrepita ipsa, totius saeculi morte finienda (De temporibus xvi, ed. Jones, 1977, p. 601, ll. 16–22).

The fifth age, up to our Lord’s advent in the flesh, extends for fourteen generations, and five hundred eighty-nine years, and in it the Hebrew people, as if exhausted by the burden of old age, were battered by ever-increasing evils. The sixth age, which is unfolding now, has no fixed sequence of generations or times, but, like extreme dotage itself, will end in the death of the whole world-age (trans. Kendall and Wallis, 2010, p. 118).

According to this tradition, which notably surfaces elsewhere in homilies and the poetry of Alcuin, the world is literally understood to be declining (see Porck 2019, esp. pp. 83–84, 86, 88). In alluding to steady cosmic degradation, we cannot assume that the poet of The Wanderer is primarily being figurative in describing an individual’s mood through natural imagery at any stage of the text, and nor can we understand its landscape without considering possible associations with punitive divine anger and ideas of world history.

When approaching this text, we should turn away, then, from appealing to pathetic fallacy along the lines of Ruskin’s concept of false appearances ‘entirely unconnected with any real power […] in the object, and only imputed to it by us’ (1856, pp. 158–159). Ruskin did not make this statement from a position of naïve realism which presumed ‘an un-emotional and “real” or “true” appearance is actually apprehensible’, instead advocating for ‘recognition of normal appearances against the hyper-subjectivism that would deny the existence of a real material world’ (Earnhardt, 2016, pp. 40–41). In some ways, Ruskin therefore anticipated ideas now current in the fields of ecological and new materialist criticism, such as Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘careful anthropomorphism’, which can lead to modes of apprehending the material world that ‘make room for the outlooks, rhythms, and trajectories of a greater number of actants’ (2010, p. 120; 2015, p. 231; see Earnhardt, 2016, p. 31, pp. 184–188). However, even Bennett’s concept of selective anthropomorphism has met with criticism for its potential pitfalls as an inevitably human-oriented framework (Steel, 2019, pp. 135–164; Žižek, 2014, p. 12). Her idea of ‘isomorphisms’—shapes and phenomena which are shared by human and nonhuman entities rather than projected by the first onto the latter—may well be more helpful as we increase our vocabulary for synchronies and overlaps between human emotional experience and external natural phenomena, and indeed to question whether these two realms can meaningfully be divided at all (Bennett 2010, p. 99; see further Soper, 2023). The Wanderer is isomorphic in its interest in synchronies between individual human experiences and nonhuman phenomena; it holds them in parallel, rather than projecting the inner emotional world of a person onto the exterior nonhuman world.

Today’s scholars are well placed to take a new look at this dynamic in the poem. An array of disciplines across the humanities and sciences, from psychiatry to phenomenology, have urged complication of a strict division between inner and outer when speaking about human emotional experience, highlighting circumstances in which this binary breaks down. For instance, one recent psychological study challenges whether phrases such as ‘lonely and cold’ can be understood as purely figurative, emphasising how social exclusion may physically cause people to feel colder (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). From the other direction, natural phenomena impact mental health in a great range of ways, including through a condition known as ‘ecological grief’ (Cianconi et al., 2020). The specific kind of Sixth Age spiritual struggle described in The Wanderer cannot be elided with modern ‘ecological grief’, but I highlight these areas of study to indicate the ways in which intellectual history has moved on from the legacy of pathetic fallacy, so often understood (not straightforwardly as Ruskin intended) as the charming mistake of thinking human moods and natural phenomena have anything to do with one another. When it comes to The Wanderer, we have more to gain from approaches rooted in ecological and new materialist criticism, and other schools of thought which attend to the importance of the material world, in the direction Tedford (2012) has indicated. As I have stressed in this section, it is only through appreciating the parallelisms between the human body and the cosmos that The Wanderer’s articulation of human affect in connection with the natural world can truly be understood.

Challenging the Term’s Implications: The Goal of Dramatic Characterisation

In this section, I will challenge the idea of ‘pathetic fallacy’ from another angle, questioning its realist aesthetic values in terms of character formation. This is especially worthwhile because the view that this poem relies on the device often travels with the view that the first half of the poem is firmly personal and self-oriented in nature, while the second aims towards universality and objective truth. A turning-point in the monologue is often posited to lie around lines 58–60. At this point, according to Calder:

[The wanderer] no longer views the hostile seascape as connected only to his own state of mind, nor does he see the pattern of loss as relevant only to his particular existence. His mind seizes on the life of all noble warriors (l. 60) and this image enables him to generalize his reflection to the topos of the Sixth Age of the World, where all is decay and destruction as the world awaits the Second Coming.¹²

This scholar helpfully directs us to relevant theological and exegetical contexts, but sees these as salient only to the second half of the poem, where the first half advances natural imagery which points only to the specific emotional condition of an individual.

Indeed, early scholars of the poem sometimes saw two entirely different speakers to narrate the two halves. So, for Nora K. Kershaw, only the first section ‘deals with a ‘wanderer—or rather a homeless man of the upper class who has lost his lord’, the second ‘consists of reflections upon a ruin’ (1922, pp. 1–7). For Bernard Huppé, the poem consists mainly of ‘two contrasting and complementary pagan monologues’, the speech of ‘the wanderer’ (ll. 8a–62, signposted as that of the ‘eard-stapa’, 6a) and the speech of ‘the wiseman’ (92–110, signposted as that of the 'snottor', 111a), linked by a Christian ‘bridge passage’ (62b–87; 1943, pp. 528–529; see further Lumianksy, 1950; Pope, 1965; Richman, 1982). In more recent scholarship, it is the norm to see the poem as containing only one monologue, that of a single ‘wanderer’ figure who finds spiritual consolation in the second half of his speech, with this monologue introduced and concluded by a narratorial voice, although the location of the beginning of the monologue is still debated—should we understand lines 1–5 as spoken by the ‘wanderer’, or the narrator? (Richman, 1982).

We can cast doubt, however, on whether the ‘hostile seascape’ or ‘the pattern of loss’ described by the wanderer figure ever refer solely to ‘his particular existence’, as Calder claims (1971, p. 272). Critics have long struggled to delineate the boundaries of direct speech in the poem, and the whole enterprise can be understood as something of a red herring. Speech marks have not accidentally dropped out of The Wanderer at some regrettable point in its transmission history: it was composed in a milieu that did not use them, and the resultant ambiguity is an integral part of the text (see previously Pasternack, 1991, esp. pp. 119–20). Elise Louviot has demonstrated the permeability of the boundaries between speaking voices in a collection of longer Old English poems, stressing a ‘lack of a unified voice’ and a ‘lack of a clearly distinct point of view’ when it comes to narrators, and concluding that when we read this body of poetry, ‘any apparent sign of irony or implicit characterisation must be treated with the utmost care, if not outright suspicion’ (2016, p. 252). Indeed, in The Wanderer’s opening lines, we are not pointed to a dramatic character whose point of view is wholly distinct from the highly Christian narrative voice which emerges at the end of the poem:

Oft him an-haga are gebideð,

metudes miltse, þeah þe he mod-cearig

geond lagu-lade longe sceolde

hreran mid hondum hrim-cealde sæ,

wadan wræc-lastas. (ll. 1–5a).

Often the solitary one awaits [/experiences] grace [/favour], the mercy of the creator [/fate], even though, heart-sorrowful, for a long time he had to stir the ice-cold sea with his hands through the water-course, traverse the path of exile.

Whether or not we understand these lines to actually be spoken by the ‘eard-stapa’ of line 6, they describe a figure already connected to a divine power, whether said to be experiencing grace or favour in the present (the sense of gebidan that Leslie sees as active here) or simply anticipating it, in gebidan’s other primary sense, ‘to wait’.¹³ These lines certainly do not signal that the subsequent poem will be a conversion narrative, in which a specific pagan nobleman of the heroic age becomes newly Christian. They signal a more spiritually knowledgeable ‘wanderer’ figure from the outset, who has a point of view which shares considerable overlap with the narrative voice—difficult even to distinguish from it—and who experiences the harsh conditions of the natural world in a manner which anticipates a supernatural intervention.

Like the rest of the poem, these lines also lack any reference to specific individuals, societies, or deities of the heroic age. Although Huppé declares that the wanderer ‘reveals only the distress of a pagan whose soul is darkened with sorrow, who has nowhere to turn, no way out’, there is in fact nothing meaningfully ‘pagan’ about the first half of The Wanderer (Huppé, 1943, p. 526). No pagan gods are named, as they are in the Nine Herbs Charm or Maxims I (l. 132a), nor historic individuals from pagan eras, as dwelt upon by the poets of Beowulf, Deor, and Widsith. These last three poems are filled with proper nouns, but in The Wanderer there are arguably none (epithets for God aside), somewhat undermining Cook’s assertion that ‘the plot is rooted in the poem’s historical moment, as the heroic, pre-Christian ethos of the Germanic comitatus is replaced, at least in part, by the more individualistic guilt-culture of Christianity’ (1996, p. 127).¹⁴ The poem’s description of the dark and cold natural world in contrast to the joys of the hall is frequently compared to Bede’s account of one pagan’s view of life as the flight of a sparrow through a hall (see, e.g., Hurley, 2019; p. 31 Osborn, 1974, p. 125; Mitchell and Robinson, 2012, p. 276), but we can equally make a case for The Wanderer echoing the ruined scenes of feasting and merriment in Isaiah 24 (after Leneghan, 2016), or indeed the possible intellectual heritage of the poem in Boethius’s meditations on ‘the loss of social position and material goods’ (see Anlezark, 2015, p. 84, summarising Horgan, 1987, but concluding these parallels may be coincidental). It is true that The Wanderer makes frequent mention of lords, halls, and exile, but it is hard to identify an Old English poem that does not, because such rhetoric is an intrinsic part of this poetic tradition’s ‘aesthetics of the familiar’, as termed by Elizabeth Tyler (2006). The idiom of halls, treasure-giving, and exile in Genesis or Exodus is rarely taken as a historicising effort on the part of the poets, one which literally anchors the narratives in a pre-Christian northern European past; instead, we accept that discursive and rhetorical norms are at play. Furthermore, metaphors of warfare took root in Christianity in its early stages in the form of the miles Christi (‘soldier of Christ’) tradition, which Old English poets seem to have drawn upon extensively (Hill, 1981; Niles, 2019, pp. 11–14). We should therefore retain some doubt about whether the poet of The Wanderer is aiming to historicise, given that Old English poetry gravitates toward a heroic and martial idiom throughout the period, in a manner frequently harmonious with established Christian thought. Such a perspective challenges our sense that the main speaker of The Wanderer is dramatically characterised as a specific historical individual from the heroic age. The problems that the poems stages—of isolation, despair, distraction, and worldliness—are not invoked as specific to a certain individual, but rather as spiritual threats on a more universal level.¹⁵

Indeed, further compromising our sense of a dramatically characterised pagan ‘wanderer’, there is considerable ambiguity in that initial oft: we could take this adverb to denote how frequently a single exiled figure experiences grace, or alternatively how frequently a whole array of people—those who feel themselves to be in exile—experience the same. Both kinds of usage of oft appear later in the text. In the first-person, the eard-stapa declares ‘Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce/ mine ceare cwiþan’ (‘Often alone at each dawn I have had to lament my cares’, ll. 8–9a), but equally he goes on to remark of a set of people, ‘Forðon dom-georne dreorigne oft/ in hyra breost-cofan bindað fæste’ (‘Therefore those eager for glory often bind sorrowful thoughts in their breast-enclosures’, ll. 17–18). Later in the poem, the speaker describes another ‘solitary one’ (an-hoga, 40a) who ‘wat’ (‘understands’, l. 37a), although whether this person ‘understands’ the speaker’s emotional plight or some deeper spiritual truth is left unclear. Of this person, the speaker remarks ‘sorg ond slæp somod ætgædre/ earmne an-hogan oft gebindað’ (‘sorrow and sleep both together often bind the miserable lone-dweller’, ll. 39–40)—indeed, many of the experiences that tend to be casually classed as belonging to ‘the Wanderer’ are described in the third-person and introduced by the primary speaker with that initial ambiguous tag: ‘Wat se þe cunnað[…]’ (‘that one knows […]’, 29b). We are invited on this occasion, and in lines 17–18, to contemplate a plurality of people occupying a similar emotional and spiritual situation. In the poem’s first line, we can likewise detect a gnomic ring, pointing to a spiritual experience often encountered by those who find themselves to be wandering in some kind of exile.

When approaching these opening lines, we can furthermore compare the idea of ‘waiting for the Lord’ in the Psalms, which have only in recent years been appreciated as a crucial context for The Wanderer and other Old English lyrics (Leneghan, 2016; Toswell, 2010, 2014; Zacher, 2021). Psalm 129.4–5 (De profundis), for example, reads ‘[…] sustinui te, Domine. Sustinuit anima mea in verbum tuum; sperauit anima mea in Domino’ (‘I have waited for thee, O Lord. My soul hath relied on your word; my soul hath hoped in the Lord’, Romanum Psalter, ed. Weber [1953], punctuation modified, translation modified from Douay-Rheims). Even closer to the key concerns of the opening of The Wanderer, compare the close of Psalm 26: ‘Expecta Dominum et uiriliter age, et confortetur cor tuum, et sustine Dominum’ (‘Expect the Lord and do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord’, 26.14).¹⁶ This sentiment captures not only the note of ‘waiting for the Lord’ struck in line 1 of The Wanderer, but the expectations of restraint as the proper custom ‘in eorle’ (‘in a man’, 12a) explored in lines 11b–14. If we understand The Wanderer as appealing to a psalmic register, this further suggests that the experiences of spiritual danger and struggle that the poem narrates are framed as common to many, rather than distinctive of one dramatic character experiencing a conversion.

In the light of all the above, we may view with some scepticism the short introductory preface provided in the eighth edition of Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s Guide to Old English (2012, p. 276):

The Wanderer [...] is a dramatic monologue briefly introduced by the Christian poet and briefly concluded by him with a terse exhortation to seek comfort in God the Father. The monologue itself is spoken by a heroic-age nobleman whose assessment of life’s meaning shows no awareness of Christian enlightenment. The only outside forces of which he has knowledge are fate, the forces of nature, and a ‘creator of men’ (ælda scyppend, l. 85) whose only action in the poem is to lay waste to all that men have made. [...] At l. 58 he begins to move from his personal sorrow into a sense of the sorrowful state of the entire world where all is transient and meaningless.

This introduction sends a reader into the text with several risky preconceptions. One problem is, of course, the binary relationship so confidently asserted between the Christian perspective of the poet-narrator and the pagan nobleman ‘wanderer’, including a dismissal of the direct reference to the ‘creator of men’ at line 85. The authors seem to see the action of ‘lay[ing] waste’ as a fringe aspect of the Christian God, rather than a divine quality with innumerable scriptural attestations which also attracted the imagination of the vernacular poets of Riddle 1 and Exodus (esp. ll. 447–515), for example.

Furthermore, we find another reference to line 58 as a turning point. There is insufficient space here to fully reckon with the relationship of lines 1–57 and 58–115, but above I have argued that implicit references to the Sixth Age seem to be present in first part of the poem, as are suggestions that the figure of the ‘wanderer’ is, and always was, aware of a Christian framework. Here, it remains to emphasise that this supposedly redirectional line begins with the conjunction ‘forþon’ (‘therefore’, l. 58a), as the speaker confesses he cannot think why his ‘mod-sefa […] ne gesweorce’ (‘mind […] does not grow dark’, l. 59) when he contemplates the life of men in the world (paralleling the earlier ‘forþon’ at l. 37a). This is a causal conjunction rather than an adversative one, and it ushers us into a short passage of metacommentary on the nature of the speaker’s thought, rather than performing a sudden jolt from the purely personal to the impersonal. Poets working on Old English had plenty of options for signalling a sudden new direction in a narrative or a thought process. Table-turning oþþæt constructions shape Beowulf and the Riddles (Irving Jr., 1968, pp. 31–42; Luo, 2018 p. 87), while other shorter Old English lyrics like The Rhyming Poem, Deor, and The Wife’s Lament make effective use of nu (see Orchard, 2010, p. 105, 108–109, noting also its use in Beowulf). These conjunctions forcefully signal a sudden upheaval, but that is not what we find in The Wanderer. Instead, the poem suggests a gradual evolution of thought: a witnessing of loss and of tangible earthly destruction which may risk despair (see previously Anlezark, 2015; Leneghan, 2016), but which leads ultimately to spiritual growth.

Finally, and importantly, Mitchell and Robinson declare that The Wanderer is a dramatic monologue. In applying this well-established critical term to the text, they draw on a longstanding scholarly tradition (see, e.g., Lumianksy, 1950) but one which should nonetheless be interrogated, especially given that the workings of voice in this text are so complex. The genre emerged in the nineteenth century with the works of poets such as Tennyson and Browning. Jonathan Culler has since argued against the dominance of the ‘dramatic monologue’, held up by critics and teachers as the model for all lyrics, and even for all poetry. He contests that this aesthetic ideal emerged as a way to ‘align poetry with the novel: the lyric is conceived as a fictional imitation of the act of the speaker’, meaning that ‘to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes’.¹⁷ The genre invites the reader to play a guessing game in uncovering a character and their situational context in a novelistic vein. Ultimately, ‘the main principle controlling the poet’s choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker’s temperament and character’ (Abrams & Harpham, 2015, p. 96). In working out the puzzle, we may even become more knowledgeable than the character themselves, such that the role of irony in dramatic monologues like Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ can be pronounced. To read The Wanderer as a dramatic monologue is to presume that the poet is holding the character’s voice and perspective at a distance, nurturing ironies in his self-presentation and description of his environment, and encouraging the audience to guess at the limitations of the character’s mental life.

Realist aesthetic ideals were always latent in Ruskin’s concept of pathetic fallacy, as he linked it to the goal of dramatic characterisation. He suggested that ‘pathetic fallacies ha[ve] their uses when taken as self-conscious aspects of personae or “characters imagined”, i.e. as essentially dramatic forms’ (as Earnhardt summarises, 2016, p. 41). Pathetic fallacy is thus an aesthetic choice that is justifiable by the aim of depicting the interior reality of the poet or a character. In viewing The Wanderer as a dramatic monologue strongly shaped by pathetic fallacy, we thus doubly invoke specifically nineteenth-century realist sets of norms. We set ourselves up to winkle out information about the ‘wanderer’ character, who is revealing his specific emotional condition indirectly and perhaps unwittingly through his perception of his situation and exterior circumstances. This minimises the opportunity to appreciate the ways in which the speaker is responding to the material reality of the surrounding cosmos and articulating a spiritual predicament to which many are vulnerable, rather than the plight of a specific, historicised individual. We are also distracted from the formal peculiarities of the text, including the alterity (from a modern perspective) of the poet’s attitude to represented speech and the boundaries between that of different speakers, as well as the heritage that the poem seems to have in the struggling, lamenting voices of the Psalms.

There are other options for framing The Wanderer in criticism and pedagogy. Culler’s recent re-evaluation of the lyric form suggests four main ‘parameters’, all of which have value for our appreciation of how The Wanderer works. He stresses particularly the way that lyrics often evoke enunciation, in that they tend to ‘create effects of voicing, or aurality’ (2015, p. 35), undoubtedly the case in The Wanderer given the speech tags which bookend the poem (‘Swa cwæð […]’; ‘So spoke […]’, ll. 6a, 111a). Challenging the associations of the ‘dramatic monologue’ as the default form of lyric, Culler highlights instead the capacity of lyrics to present ‘assertions or judgments that are not relativized to a particular speaker or fictional situation but offered as truths about the world’ (p. 35). Again, this is indisputably the case for large portions of The Wanderer, and has led to its quite justifiable inclusion in the canon of Old English ‘wisdom poetry’ by scholars such as Shippey (1994). Culler furthermore identifies ‘an explicitly hyperbolic quality’ as a parameter of the lyric (in evidence in the poem’s descriptions of landscapes), and finally a ‘ritualistic’ aspect, creating possibilities for ‘memorable writing to be received, reactivated, and repeated by readers’ (p. 37), which speaks to the heritage The Wanderer seems to have in the Psalms (and in the psalmic ‘I’ as affective technology, as understood by  Zacher, 2021).

Culler downplays the significance of ‘fictional situation’ as an aspect of lyric, and in many ways this metric does seems to point us back towards the model of the dramatic monologue—but to think about the representation of situations in lyric poems such as The Wanderer can also provide us with a way to think beyond character. Rita Felski has challenged the idea of character as the primary vector through which texts prompt affects, attachments, and identifications in readers, stressing instead (after Gaut, 2010, p. 258) that identification is ‘aspectual’, such that a reader can identify with ‘a character’s perceptions, emotions, motivations, beliefs, self-understanding, physical characteristics, experiences, or situations […] none of which necessarily implies the others’ (2020, pp. 41–42). In the light of this approach, it would be quite possible to argue that The Wanderer is not so much a poem preoccupied by a character, but by a cosmic and spiritual situation. This situation is shared by multiple solitary figures, who seem to experience a kind of intersubjectivity: ‘Wat se þe cunnað […]’ (‘that one knows […]’, 29b). Like the Psalms, the poem hinges on questions of situation and circumstance (as well as emotions and beliefs), rather than devoting itself to the individuality of a specific personality who is gradually revealed to a reader, as we would expect from a dramatic monologue full of pathetic fallacy. Instead, it is rather more what we should expect from a poem which was probably composed in a monastic context in eighth- or ninth- century England, and clearly anthologised in a monastic context in the late tenth.

Conclusion

The term ‘pathetic fallacy’ is a difficult fit with the way that The Wanderer operates. Firstly, it suggests the natural phenomena described in the poem reflect an interior emotional state, rather than material circumstances which exist independently and which inform the states of mind described in the text. The poem, however, draws on scriptural and exegetical traditions in describing stormy and wintry conditions as evidence of both the anger and power of God, and the declined condition of the world in its last age, which (it is implied) should prompt a receptive observer towards spiritual growth. As a different facet of the same problem, the term directs us towards a single mind and personality as the ultimate reference point of the natural imagery, in the same way that the term ‘dramatic monologue’ presumes the development of character as the ultimate goal of the text. However, the workings of voice in The Wanderer are complex, as has long been observed. The poem does not offer a clear picture of a single individual from the heroic age (as Beowulf does, for instance), and certainly not an individual who obviously experiences conversion. Instead, it slips around continuously in referring to multiple solitary individuals who experience doubt, fear, and despair, and grow towards knowledge. As a result, Culler’s attempts to disentangle the lyric form from the dramatic monologue are helpful for our appreciation of this text, as the genre of lyric can have many other features and functions beyond the goal of novel-adjacent character development, including the offering of enunciative possibilities, the articulation of general truths about the world, and the exploration of hyperbole. Likewise, Felski’s sense that literature can invite affective engagement through its representation of situations, rather than ‘sympathetic’ characters, carves out another way to think about The Wanderer (especially understood against a psalmic background), namely as a poem of predicament.

The diagnosis of ‘pathetic fallacy’ evolved as a way of demonstrating the aesthetic and philosophical value of The Wanderer in modern times. It was upheld by scholars invested in demonstrating the figurative artistry of the poetry. The features it conceals, though, are too important to our understanding of the text and its intellectual and literary-historical heritage to overlook. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have yielded numerous other approaches which allow underappreciated facets of the text to come to light, including the focus on the material world encouraged by the ‘nonhuman turn’. To consider The Wanderer as a lyric, to consider its affective power beyond the realm of character, and to consider the significance of its depiction of material phenomena, all offer more promising routes towards inhabiting and understanding this enigmatic piece of verse.