Poetry

YES! Finally started my essay on semantic fields in the old English ballad The Seafarer. Drama, angst, loneliness and depression - all hundreds of years ago. It is great! Well, technically it is. It would probably help a lot if I didn't have to analyse it, it is so enjoyable to read!
Some poems seem to increase in quality when analysed - well, not really, but as the various techniques used become visible, it is often more interesting. This isn't. Not really. The rhyme scheme is beautiful and challenging, finding there is a rhyme at all has proved an adventure of the special kind. And still - for some reason the lonely sea-weary seafarer in his boat is starting to get on my nerves.

Yet it is very interesting to see how much more emphasis is placed on the hall, the mead and the company of others in those Old English ballads. Even though he, the Seafarer, may be driven by his desire to find foreign shores and by the order of his Lord, he still is longing to come back again. Back home.

It is oddly awe-inspiring to see how little humans changed in those hundreds of years. It is also fascinating what a great role loniless has had. Those who were alone basically were dead. Company meant life. A Lord meant life. Being alone often was the end, facing the innumerable dangers with which people had to live.
Now loneliness also is an important topic today. Nearly everybody I know, myself included, is feeling lonely, completely misunderstood, isolated at times- and that in the age of the internet, TV, phone and so forth. A strange phenomenon - that I or my friends should need a week to call back people living in the same city,  yet to be angry if friends from all over the world don't come back to us in less than a day on the internet.
This is so different from what those people lived through then. Can anyone be as alone as that person sailing an icy, storm-tossed ocean in one of the greatest of the Old English ballads?
No one really ever is alone. One had to move to one of those tiny deserted islands in the Carribean to be alone. Still, loads if people feel they're alone and lonely. Is there an intrinsic need for loneliness? Do people cloister themselves in their private sphere, virtually nonexistant in the 'old days' of the OE period, and pretend to be isolated? What for? Does that somehow go together with the desire to be individual? Or perhaps the term for "loneliness" has become "surrounded by lots of people who (also) don't care".

Ah, whatever. Back to work. Humans haven't changed in hundreds of years, we're still virtually incomprehensible.