SOURCE: Woodcock, George. “The Wanderer: Notes on Earle Birney.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 21 (spring 1981): 85-103.

In the following essay, Woodcock examines parallels between Birney's travel-themed poetry and the journey themes found in the Old English poems “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.”

There is a sense in which the Old English poets set a pattern for the use of the journey in English literature. In poems like The Wanderer and The Seafarer, they established not merely the sense of earthly journeying as a metaphor for the inner journey “down to Gehenna or up to the throne,” as Kipling put it, but also what we now tend to see as the romantic linking of scenes of earthly desolation with the condition of man considered merely as a being of earth. I am not suggesting that these early English poets actually invented either of these connections between the mundane and...