Not Waving but Drowning Theme of Death. You'd think that there couldn't be a clearer distinction than the one between life and death, but "Not Waving but Drowning" goes out of its way to muddy the water, so to speak. The focus, after all, is a talking corpse who just won't shut up even though the living can't hear him.
The statement that best describes the symbolic and figurative meaning in the first line from the excerpt is; The speaker feels that he will someday trade places and reap while others plant.
Answer:
death
explanation:
death
