The Wife's Lament (hereafter WfL) has proved enigmatic for the best part of two centuries,
and remains so. But critical perspectives on the poem continue to shift, and shed new light
as they do so. For many years, scholars were principally concerned to unpick, through
various means, the poem's allusive narrative first half, coping with even such fundamental
issues as the number of men to whom WfL's speaker refers. However, most of those who
have looked at WfL recently have concentrated on its more lyric second half, recognising …