Wake Me Up When My Gold Lord Returns

Most people turn their misery into depression, while a few creative minds transform their feelings into writings, many times as poetry or songs. Additionally, most pieces of literature express theme in one way or another to make the piece hold a deeper message for the audience to grasp. Themes prove universal by withstanding time and exemplifying similar meanings throughout the years. Varying elements in the literature help develop a theme and produce it to become a meaningful notion. Regardless of the different seasons used to portray the message of both the poem and the song, “The Wanderer,” a poem written by an anonymous writer in the Anglo-Saxon era, and “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a song written by Green Day in the twenty-first century, compare the common theme that lingering in the past causes isolation and despair through the literary elements of symbolism of seasons that reveals the desolate mood and the narrator’s reluctance to change, imagery to further accentuate the similar theme between the two pieces, and flashback to contrast the narrator’s present depressed emotions to his past happiness.

Despite the fact that the narrators use different seasons to portray the theme, both “The Wanderer” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” develop upon season’s symbolism which depicts the desolate mood and the narrators’ reluctance to change due to their inability to let go of their past and present despair. In “The Wanderer” the narrator “woefully toil[s] on wintry seas” (l. 3) by himself because of “grievous disasters, and death of kin” (l. 7). The author uses winter to symbolize a time of little opportunity and death for the narrator because winter already examples a bleak time period with little life, and since th...

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...e in his memories now. In both pieces, the flashbacks contrast the emotions of the present-day gloomy narrator to the happier emotions of the narrator before the change while the narrators’ lingering in the past causes their own seclusion and misery.

In conclusion, through the elements of symbolism, imagery, and flashback “The Wanderer” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” produce the common theme that lingering in the past creates isolation and misery. Though written in a different time period, “The Wanderer” proves relevant to today’s time through its notable comparison with a song from thousands of years later. Themes withstand time and apply to many different types of people in different ways depending on a person’s understanding of the message implied. Through literary elements, writers depict a message that the audience interprets with their own wisdom.