What are some elegiac aspects of the Old English poem "The Seafarer"?

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

readability="8">

. . . 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

readability="8">

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:

readability="14">

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:

readability="10">

. . . 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.