transmitted from the pens of literate poets without serious corruption." With particular reference to The Seafarer, Howlett further added that "The argument of the entire poem is compressed into" lines 58–63, and explained that "Ideas in the five lines which precede the centre" (line 63) "are reflected in the five lines which follow it". By 1982 Frederick S. Holton had amplified this finding by pointing out that "it has long been recognized that The Seafarer is a unified whole and that it is possible to interpret the first sixty-three-and-a-half lines in a way that is consonant with, and leads up to, the moralizing conclusion". Themes Scholars have focused on the poem in a variety of ways. In the arguments assuming the unity of The Seafarer, scholars have debated the interpretation and translations of words, the intent and effect of the poem, whether the poem is allegorical, and, if so, the meaning of the supposed allegory. Wisdom Thomas D. Hill, in 1998, argues that the content of the poem also links it with the sapiential books, or wisdom literature, a category particularly used in biblical studies that mainly consists of proverbs and maxims. Hill argues that The Seafarer has “significant sapiential material concerning the definition of wise men, the ages of the world, and the necessity for patience in adversity”. In his account of the poem in the Cambridge Old English Reader, published in 2004, Richard Marsden writes, “It is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian”. If this interpretation of the poem, as providing a metaphor for the challenges of life, can be generally agreed upon, then one may say that it is a contemplative poem that teaches Christians to be faithful and to maintain their beliefs. Religion Scholars have often commented on religion in the structure of The Seafarer. Critics who argue against structural unity specifically perceive newer religious interpolations to a secular poem. Sweet's 1894 An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse ends the poem at line 108, not 124. In their 1918 Old English Poems, Faust and Thompson note that before line 65, "this is one of the finest specimens of Anglo-Saxon poetry" but after line 65, "a very tedious homily that must surely be a later addition". Their translation ends with "My soul unceasingly to sail o’er the