the Old English elegies. Another understanding was offered in the Cambridge Old English Reader, namely that the poem is essentially concerned to state: "Let us (good Christians, that is) remind ourselves where our true home lies and concentrate on getting there" As early as 1902 W.W. Lawrence had concluded that the poem was a “wholly secular poem revealing the mixed emotions of an adventurous seaman who could not but yield to the irresistible fascination for the sea in spite of his knowledge of its perils and hardships”. The Seafarer has attracted the attention of scholars and critics, creating a substantial amount of critical assessment. Many of these studies initially debated the continuity and unity of the poem. One early interpretation, also discussed by W. W. Lawrence, was that the poem could be thought of as a conversation between an old seafarer, weary of the ocean, and a young seafarer, excited to travel the high seas. This interpretation arose because of the arguably alternating nature of the emotions in the text. Another argument, in "The Seafarer: An Interpretation", 1937, was proposed by O.S. Anderson, who plainly stated: He nevertheless also suggested that the poem can be split into three different parts, naming the first part A1, the second part A2, and the third part B, and conjectured that it was possible that the third part had been written by someone other than the author of the first two sections. The third part may give an impression of being more influenced by Christianity than the previous parts. However, he also stated that and added, to counter suggestions that there had been interpolations, that: "personally I believe that [lines 103–124] are to be accepted as a genuine portion of the poem". Moreover, in "The Seafarer; A Postscript", published in 1979, writing as O.S. Arngart, he simply divided the poem into two sections. The first section represents the poet's life on earth, and the second tells us of his longing to voyage to a better world, to Heaven. In most later assessments, scholars have agreed with Anderson/Arngart in arguing that the work is a well-unified monologue. In 1975 David Howlett published a textual analysis which suggested that both The Wanderer and The Seafarer are "coherent poems with structures unimpaired by interpolators"; and concluded that a variety of "indications of rational thematic development and balanced structure imply that The Wanderer and The Seafarer have been