Some critics consider "The Seafarer" a kind of dialogue or conversation between two opposing attitudes. If the poem were a conversation between two...

The poet of “The Seafarer” does indeed present two opposing viewpoints in his poem. However, there is no doubt which view the speaker espouses, since he is speaking in the first-person for much of the poem. In fact, he begins with this line:

This tale is true, and mine.

He then goes on to tell about his tribulations upon the cold, forbidding sea in lines 8-11:

My feet were cast

In icy bands, bound with...

The poet of “The Seafarer” does indeed present two opposing viewpoints in his poem. However, there is no doubt which view the speaker espouses, since he is speaking in the first-person for much of the poem. In fact, he begins with this line:

This tale is true, and mine.

He then goes on to tell about his tribulations upon the cold, forbidding sea in lines 8-11:

My feet were cast

In icy bands, bound with frost,

With frozen chains, and hardship groaned

Around my heart.

At first his tale seems to be simply about a man in a boat on a dangerous ocean. But a little later we begin to see that his real concern is spiritual, in lines 64-66:

Thus the joys of God

Are fervent with life, where life itself

Fades quickly in to the Earth.

The speaker appears to be using the ocean as a metaphor for the difficult and treacherous journey that must be made by the human soul.

The other side of the discussion is concerned with the safety and comfort of life as part of civilization. When man exists within the man-made world, he experiences things like this, from lines 48-49.

Orchards blossom, the towns bloom,

Fields grow lovely as the world springs fresh.

The poet is establishing something called a “juxtaposition.” Artists juxtapose when they present ideas side by side for the purpose of contrasting them. The “Seafarer” poet wants to contrast the solitary, spiritually courageous man with the comfort-seeking socially dependent man.