Interpretations of The Seafarer have suffered much from its being pigeon-holed almost invariably with The Wanderer (Text 38), a near-neighbour in the anthology of secular and religious poetry known as the Exeter Book (see below), as an ‘elegy’. There is in fact little that is elegiac about it. Rather, it is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian, who perceives the spiritual emptiness of an easy life on ‘dry land’ and actively seeks to earn future heavenly bliss by embracing a rigorous exile from that life. This creates the crucial paradox of the poem, which is exposed in line 33: Seafaring is a wretched business – as the speaker has firmly persuaded us with his own ‘true story’ – and therefore (OE forflon) he must embrace it all the more. The more uncompromisingly realistic the opening account of seafaring, the more disturbing – and therefore effective – the paradox. This has been resisted by those readers of The Seafarer who have sought a smooth passage through the poem, yet the wilful desire of the seafarer to embrace the very hardship which he has just so graphically evoked is at its heart. At a literal level the message is harshly ascetic, but it is predicated unambiguously on hope and the (metaphorical) ‘seafarer’ will not therefore have regrets, though the allure of the life on land may still have its effects.