How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
A new sense, a new entity is added to my soul. (13)
Well now. What's that you say? This sounds suspiciously like this guy has undergone some sort of serious transformation during his time on the ship. His very soul is changed. That sounds an awful lot like the afterlife if you ask Shmoop. It's as if the narrator's time on the ship has changed him on a spiritual level, perhaps in ways that it couldn't were he still among the living.
Quote #2
They all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. (19)
These guys should be nearing death, so why are they trying to usher it along even faster than it already approaches? Unless they're undead, in which case maybe they're looking for a final end.
Quote #3
I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour. (8)
This general expression of despair suggests that even hope depresses the narrator to no end. It's as if he's saying, what's the point of hope, when you know you have none? You might as well resign yourself to your fate and hang on for the ride.
Quote #4
We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. (20)
Maybe he's just being melodramatic here, but you could read this as telling us that narrator has died, and is somehow stuck somewhere between this life and the next, unable to move on.
Quote #5
Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. (14)
If the crew can't see the narrator, it may be because they're the ghosts of the dead… or he is. Now there's a chilling thought.
Quote #6
The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries. (22)
Notice the use of the word "like" here. It suggests that the crew are ghosts without actually coming right out and saying it. But that's close enough, right? For all their creepy, aloof behavior, they might as well be specters.
Quote #7
I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. (22)
The ancient ruins and fallen pillars symbolize long-dead civilizations, and the narrator draws comparisons to them by suggesting that his soul is no different.
Quote #8
We are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. (27)
If the whirlpool represents death, then Poe keeps whatever comes after it a mystery. The center of the whirlpool is lost in blackness and while the narrator may find out what lies beyond it, we never do. But that's just how it goes, we guess.