ABSTRACT
These shorter poems, of which the Wanderer, the Seafarer, and the Wife's Complaint, are the chief representatives that remain, together with the noble fragment of the Ruin, show lyric poetry in its earliest stage, in which the narrative and descriptive element still predominates over the purely lyric. The present piece has been selected in preference to the Seafarer, which is undoubtedly the finest of them all, as being less fragmentary and corrupt.
