whale-path / Over the waves of the sea", with a note below "at this point the dull homiletic passage begins. Much of it is quite untranslatable." A number of subsequent translators, and previous ones such as Pound in 1911, have based their interpretations of the poem on this belief, and this trend in early Old English studies to separate the poem into two parts—secular and religious—continues to affect scholarship. Disagreeing with Pope and Whitelock's view of the seafarer as a penitential exile, John F. Vickrey argues that if the Seafarer were a religious exile, then the speaker would have related the “joys of the spirit” and not his miseries to the reader. This reading has received further support from Sebastian Sobecki, who argues that Whitelock's interpretation of religious pilgrimage does not conform to known pilgrimage patterns at the time. Instead, he proposes the vantage point of a fisherman. However, the text contains no mention, or indication of any sort, of fishes or fishing; and it is arguable that the composition is written from the vantage point of a fisher of men; that is, an evangelist. Douglas Williams suggested in 1989: "I would like to suggest that another figure more completely fits its narrator: The Evangelist". Marsden points out that although at times this poem may seem depressing, there is a sense of hope throughout it, centered on eternal life in Heaven. Literal view Dorothy Whitelock claimed that the poem is a literal description of the voyages with no figurative meaning, concluding that the poem is about a literal penitential exile. Allegorical view Pope believes the poem describes a journey not literally but through allegorical layers. Greenfield, however, believes that the seafarer’s first voyages are not the voluntary actions of a penitent but rather imposed by a confessor on the sinful seaman. Daniel G. Calder argues that the poem is an allegory for the representation of the mind, where the elements of the voyages are objective symbols of an “exilic” state of mind. Contrasted to the setting of the sea is the setting of the land, a state of mind that contains former joys. When the sea and land are joined through the wintry symbols, Calder argues the speaker’s psychological mindset changes. He explains that is when “something informs him that all life on earth is like death. The land the seafarer seeks on this new and outward ocean voyage is