In the anonymous poem ‘The Wanderer’, an Anglo-Saxon warrior returns to a town ransacked and ruined by Vikings, and is prompted to reflect that one day all the works of men will lie empty and open to the sky. He thinks back over many battles, and sighs for people and places that are gone forever.

The poet continues his lament for a vanished community and way of life; his glance falls on a stone cross commemorating the dead, and (his mood affected by grey winter weather) is reminded that in this life nothing is possessed forever, neither buildings nor comrades, not even family; even the earth itself will one day vanish.

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