to annihilation after he dies, or "The Wife's Lament," which ends with the wife uncertain if she will ever see her exiled husband again. "The Seafarer" also has elegiac elements, even though it is not a full elegy.

The poem concerns a man experiencing harsh conditions at sea. This man is also the speaker of the poem. In addition to his physical grievances, the speaker mourns the loss of his former life as a warrior. When speaking of his past, he conjures up images related to celebration and community. So full of longing for his former way of life is he that the speaker starts projecting impressions of the past onto his current environment:

There I heard nothing except the thrumming sea,
the ice-cold waves. Sometimes the swan’s song
I kept to myself as diversion, the cry of the gannet
and the curlew’s voice for the laughter of men—
the seagull’s singing for the drinking of mead.

Laughter and mead suggest the warmth of community, which the speaker no longer has alone on the sea.

What keeps "The Seafarer" from being a full-blown elegy like "The Wife's Lament" is its theology. The speaker's Christian faith steels him against despair, since he believes the faithful will be rewarded with peace and love in heaven after death. As a result, the loss of his youth, community, and former comforts is easier to bear.

Much, if not all, of “The Seafarer” can be regarded as an elegy, because it represents an extended lament on lost things that clearly mean so much to the speaker. And the speaker has clearly lost much. As well as old friends,= and the years of his youth, he feels that he has lost what was once a vigorous and noble civilization whose values as an Anglo-Saxon warrior he deeply cherished and venerated.

The speaker has also lost a sense of community by being forced to take to the high seas alone. His isolation out there on the often stormy seas deprives him of the human company that a man of his time and culture desperately needs. Gregariousness was highly prized in Anglo-Saxon culture, and so one can see why the speaker is lamenting over his status as a seafarer. Companionship with the many seabirds he encounters on his epic voyages simply isn’t enough.

What prevents us from regarding “The Seafarer” as an elegy in its entirety, however, is its message of Christian hope. The speaker may have much to lament, but what he's lost in terms of human companionship, he's more than gained in the fellowship of Christ.

For the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer," some, but not all, of the characteristics of elegy are present. Here are those elegiac characteristics:

• There is a melancholic, mournful tone to the poem

The poem's speaker relates how the sea took his "sea-worthy soul" "in sorrow and fear and pain," showing him "suffering" and "hardship." Further, the speaker notes how he has been "wretched" as he has drifted on an "ice-cold sea," and his soul has "drown[ed] in desolation." Also, he has passed his life without a family and been subjected to all types of weather.

• The thoughts of the speaker are formed with imagination in the first person.

In lines 11-12, he states, "Around my heart, Hunger tore/At my sear-weary soul," and in line 26, he describes his "my soul left drowning in desolation." Later, he describes in lines 29-30 "...how wearily/I put myself back on the paths of the sea."

• Questions about destiny, fate, and justice

The first part of "The Seafarer" involves such questions about fate and destiny as the speaker reflects that he is "Wondering what Fate has willed and will do" as the ship roams the seas and wanders to far-off parts of the world. In his many journeys to sea, the sailor has never known what will happen:

No man has ever faced the dawn
Certain which of Fate's three threats
Would fall: illness, or age, or an enemy's
Sword, snatching the life from his soul....

Further, the speaker reflects that those who "forget their God" suffer death, while the man who lives a humble life "has angels from Heaven" bring him courage and conviction and strength.

• As a Christian elegy, the poem moves from grief and misery to hope and happiness since death is only a passage to eternal life.

After all the hardships of being a sailor, experiencing storms, illness, and battle, while the sword snatches life from the seafarer, his bravery is rewarded as a man of honor. His soul, released from his body, feels no pain and, instead

,,,rise[s] to that eternal joy,
That life born in the love of God
And the hope of Heaven. (ll.122-124)

An elegy is, put simply, a poem of mourning, and the poem's first lines immediately begin to identify it as such. The narrator says that he will go on to describe "toilsome times" that forced him to endure "desperate days." He claims to have experienced "Bitter breast-cares" in his exploration of a great many "sorrowful places"; he has long been the victim of his "sea-wearied mind." As a seafarer, he has been "wretchedly sorrowful" in his exile and solitude from the rest of humankind. Completely alone in the elements, he has had "No sheltering kinsfolk" to comfort his "impoverished spirit." The joys of life have been kept from him, he feels. Because he is absent from land for such long stretches, his recollection of land is so much sweeter than anyone who experiences it every day; those people, he calls "pleasure-wealthy" compared to himself. He says that he lives a "dead life." He hopes that he will reap the rewards of his toil in the afterlife, with God. Thus, he mourns his life, himself, and hopes for a better life to come.

Elegiac poetry was one of the primary genres of Anglo-Saxon poetic output. In "The Seafarer," we can see the three sections of the elegy which continue to define the form to this day.

The first part of an elegy is the lament, in which the speaker expresses his profound depths of sorrow at the current state of the world. This can be found in the opening section of "The Seafarer," which begins with a description of the speaker's suffering, his merewerges mod, or sea-weary soul, and the cold which enfolds him at all times. It is evident that the speaker's current situation is an unhappy one, without comfort or friendly kinsmen, treading the paths of exile.

The second part of the elegy is the reflection upon, and praise of, those who have died. In the case of this poem, the speaker is mourning the loss of his kinsmen and reflecting upon the valorous deeds they once performed. He talks of the "daring deeds" of those he once fought with and those who are now committed to the earth.

Finally, an elegy concludes with an element of consolation, a suggestion that there can be some end eventually to the speaker's grief. The final section of this poem acknowledges that "God is mightier / Than any man's thought" and that eventually, the speaker will have a heavenly rest to look forward to. However, it is interesting to note that this section is often thought to be an interpolation from a later Christian period. It could be that the original Anglo-Saxon form of the elegy contained only the first two parts with no consolation offered to the speaker. This would be a reflection of a different society and a pre-Christian ideology.

Elegies can be laments for the dead. They can also be self-reflective poems. This is the case of "The Seafarer." Elegies are most notably mournful and melancholy. Although elegies were initially defined by their structure and general tone, they came to be known primarily for their subject matter. And the themes have something to do with sad reflection, laments for the dead, and a mourning of some kind. 

"The Seafarer" gets right into a self-reflective mourning: 

This tale is true, and mine. It tells

How the sea took me, swept me back

And forth in sorrow and fear and pain

Showed me suffering in a hundred ships, 

In a thousand ports and in me. 

The speaker is mourning his very existence as though it were a death in life. He uses words associated with profound sadness and coldness to describe his predicament: "an ice-cold sea, whirled in sorrow," and "a soul left drowning in desolation." He mourns his life and because of the dangerous nature of his occupation, he fears his death. The speaker also notes how fleeting life is with "life itself / Fades quickly into the earth." So, even though he feels desolate in his own life, he still laments the fact that life is so fleeting. The speaker's only solace is the promise of Heaven. He continues speaking of graves, lost kinsmen, and memories of those departed. All of these are themes typical of the elegy. 

The Old English poem “The Seafarer” can be considered elegiac – that is, sorrowful in tone – in many different respects, including the following:

• The poem opens with its speaker explicitly declaring that the sea has swept him

. . . back

And forth in sorrow and fear and pain,

Showed me suffering in a hundred ships . . . (2-4)

• While the lines just quoted emphasize emotional pain, ensuing lines make it clear that the speaker has suffered much physical pain as well.
• Sometimes physical and emotional pain are united, as when the speaker declares, “Hunger tore / At my sea-weary soul” (11-12)and when he describes how he was

Alone in a world blown clear of love,

Hung with icicles. (16-17)

• The speaker feels both physically isolated and emotionally alienated; he is cut off from most sources of social pleasure and consolation.  His only companions are sea birds who themselves seem to be suffering and in pain.  He is distant from even from kinsmen, and no romantic companion is even mentioned.
• The speaker is not only aware of his past, present, and future sufferings at sea but is also aware that death of some kind, from some source, is inevitable, thus giving him another reason to feel sorrow:

No man has ever faced the dawn

Certain which of Fate's three threats

Would fall: illness, or age, or an enemy's

Sword, snatching the life from his soul. (69-72)

• Another reason for sorrow, the speaker also soon suggests, is that the world itself has declined from what it once was. Sorrow, then, is felt not only personally by this particular speaker but is also felt more broadly, by many humans living at this time:

. . . All glory is tarnished.

The world's honor ages and shrinks,

Bent like the men who mold it. (92-94)

By the second half of the poem, it is clear that the speaker is mourning not only for his own suffering but for the suffering of all people at all times. His lamentation is mainly for the painful mutability of life on earth.

• Ultimately, however, in the second half of the poem and especially in its final lines, the attention of the speaker becomes focused increasingly on God and heaven as alternatives and answers to earthly suffering. Paradoxically, then, a poem that spends much of its phrasing engaged in elegiac lamentation ends with a tone of clear celebration of God and of the glories of the life to come. The sufferings the poem details for most of its length help make the satisfactions of eternal life in heaven with God seem all the more appealing.