Not Waving but Drowning Death Quotes

These lines insist twice that he's speaking and twice that he's dead. It's a confusing state of affairs, to be sure. Why do you think the poem starts with these two contradictory states? Is it a haunted poem?

The opposition here is between the lively activity of waving and the deadly one of drowning. Nobody knew (or knows now) that his life was in jeopardy. Life and death are so close to each other that one can be mistaken for the other. At least, they can be if your friends are too busy with their own games and struggles.

Though the speaker here might not have been aware that the dead man had been dying for a long time, he or she (or they) is at least aware of the outcome. It's so strange, the speaker thinks, that someone who appeared to love life so much could suddenly be dead. This is a weighty subject, so no wonder the speaker has a hard time saying it in a way that sounds appropriate to the situation. Still, it's kinda funny. It just goes to show how little these folks really understood about the guy, huh?

Instead of reflecting too much on the dead man's life, the speaker or speakers here try to grapple with the immediate situation: his death and its cause. Sure, they're gossiping and ignoring the real issue, but they're also trying to force death to make sense. Which is a pretty difficult thing to do. So they go the CSI route and get all technical about cause of death.

By repeating an earlier statement and taking on the others' comment about the coldness of the water, the dead man tries to get them to understand that death wasn't just a single moment for him. He always felt the deathly chill of isolation, as long as he was alive. This is an even scarier situation than the talking corpse of the beginning. Here he suggests that in a way he was always dead, or that life is only one long moment of dying. In the face of that idea, we would probably prefer to speculate about a heart attack, right along with the people of stanza 2.