Elegy as a poetic form typically portrays sorrow and nostalgia. "The Seafarer" immediately draws readers into a world of exile, struggle, and solitude to highlight its theme of longing. The poem's narrator conveys his feelings of alienation through vivid depictions of physical hardship and suffering: “My feet were cast / In icy bands, bound with frost, / With frozen chains, and hardship groaned / Around my heart” (8b-11a). The chilling cold that grips his feet, immobilized in the open hull of his ship as it sails through a wintry sea, reflects the torment within his mind. “Alone in a world blown clear of love,” he listens to the cries of various birds, their calls replacing human laughter, enduring the presence of these feathered companions without the warmth of human connections. For those who admire the fiercely independent individual who faces challenges alone, without support from family or friends, the depth of these lines might not be immediately obvious. It's crucial to remember that the Anglo-Saxon society was interconnected through familial and loyalty bonds. For people of that time, the kind of isolation experienced by the seafarer in this poem was comparable to a form of psychological death. Due to his social separation, a wr’ce, meaning an “exile” or “wanderer” in Old English, was particularly vulnerable to the whims of Fate mentioned in the poem. Without the safety of close human relationships, he was more at risk of falling victim to “illness, or age, or an enemy’s / Sword” (71-72a).

While the seafarer suffers in isolation at sea, an inner longing compels him to return to the source of his distress. The human condition, universally shared and enduring throughout time and cultures, delicately balances between desire and aversion. How often do individuals find themselves in a "love-hate" relationship with their job, a pastime, or, even more troubling, another person? Those who live comfortably in cities, enjoying fine dining and the pleasures of wine and song, cannot grasp the "push-pull" the seafarer feels. Yet, the seafarer's unclear situation symbolizes the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in life: “Thus the joys of God / Are fervent with life, where life itself / Fades quickly into the earth. The wealth / Of the world neither reaches to Heaven nor remains” (65-69). These lines, filled with sorrow and acceptance, echo throughout Western literature, reflecting themes of Christian contemptu mundi (“contempt of the world”) and existential despair over life's absurd lack of meaning. The seafarer's response lies somewhere between these two extremes in European thought. The Germanic heroic ideal of achieving immortality through the living memory of one's people merges with the Christian hope for an afterlife reward, offering meaning to the seafarer's struggles in a world of pain, unmet desires, and constant sorrow.

The seafarer's profound despair stems from the stark contrast he observes between the current "fallen" world and the glorious past. The Germanic heroic era, originating from the significant tribal migrations that signaled the decline of the Western Roman Empire, is celebrated in the literature of the British Saxons, Icelandic Norse, and the continental Germans who remained in the ancestral tribal lands of the Germanic people. This was a period of heroic feats that eclipse any modern achievements: “Now there are no rulers, no emperors, / No givers of gold, as once there were, / When wonderful things were worked among them / And they lived in lordly magnificence. / Those powers have vanished, those pleasures are dead” (84-88). Today's world seems lackluster by comparison: “The weakest survives and the world continues, / Kept spinning by toil. All glory is tarnished. / The world’s honor ages and shrinks, / Bent like the men who mold it” (89-92). Much like the ancient Greeks, the Germanic peoples mourned the loss of a "Golden Age." The speaker's words convey a deep longing for a more untamed and exhilarating time before the "civilization" brought by Christendom. While the poem clearly appeals to a Christian God, the memory of pagan heroism remains in "The Seafarer" with a poignant nostalgia, explaining why the speaker prefers the hardships and dangers of seafaring over the more settled life in town. On the other hand, the speaker's discontent with the present world also reflects a genuine Christian critique of life's fleeting emptiness. This very tension between the two themes maintains the poem's literary power, despite cultural changes over the years.

Early scholars of Anglo-Saxon literature believed that “The Seafarer” represented an early pagan poem that had been adapted for Christian audiences by the insertion of pious formulas throughout and a moral at the end; accordingly, these scholars expended considerable ingenuity in attempting to excise the Christian elements to discover the “real poem” hidden beneath these composite overlays. Pound’s famous translation, in line with this emphasis, systematically removes or downplays many explicitly Christian elements of the poem and stops before the overtly homiletic conclusion, which features some dozen direct references to God and the heavens in the last twenty-five lines.

Now, however, critics seem generally to agree that the two halves of the poem are unified by a movement from earthly chaos to heavenly order and that its coherent thematic thrust is the Christian message that the afterlife is more important than life on Earth. The poem is frequently discussed in conjunction with “The Wanderer,” another Exeter Book poem that shares many themes and motifs with “The Seafarer,” including the structure in which a specific treatment of biographical subject matter—the plight of a wanderer or seafarer—is followed by a more general homiletic section that draws a religious meaning from the earlier material.

The sailor, as a man required to travel over a hostile and dangerous environment, had always seemed to Christian poets to be a naturally apt image of the believer’s life on Earth, which should be viewed as a hazardous journey to the true homeland of Heaven rather than as a destination to be valued in itself. In this poem, the speaker seems to be a religious man (or reformed sinner) who has chosen the seafaring life as much for its efficacy as a means of spiritual discipline as for any commercial gain to be derived from it. The original opposition in the poem between landsmen and seafarers gives way to the insight that all men are, or ought to think of themselves as, seafarers, in the sense that they are all exiles from their true home in Heaven. As lines 31-32 (previously quoted) establish, the land can be just as cold and forbidding as the sea, and the virtuous, at least, should hope that they will be sojourning in this harsh world for only a brief time.

True Christian “seafarers” must psychologically distance themselves from secular life, as the seafarer of this poem has done both literally and figuratively. The poet appears to encapsulate his theme at the pivotal midpoint of the poem: “therefore the joys of the Lord seem warmer to me than this dead life, fleeting on land.” This recommended ascetic withdrawal from worldly interests should enable the Christian to properly reject the comforts of life on the land as transient and seek spiritual rather than physical comforts.