i
- Achille realizes that Helen is not going to come back to him; he sees a sea-swift flying over the ocean and takes it as a sign that he's lost his girl.
- Achille puts out to sea with his mate, taking time to admire the seascape and his fisherman's life.
- The swift reappears and Achille feels as though she is pulling the boat out to sea. It occurs to him that the bird is a messenger of the gods and he feels a sudden panic.
ii
- As they follow the bird (which the mate does not see), the boat goes farther from the island.
- Achille thinks of the dead that must be under the shadow of the boat at that very moment, and remembers the names of the drowned—including Midshipman Plunkett.
- As the sun beats down, Achille sprinkles the bound sail with water to keep it from drying out and tearing. He ultimately drops it into the sea to give it a good drenching.
- But the white bundle suddenly appears to him as a dead body trussed up in its shroud in the water, and he loses his composure.
- He hears the shriek of a gull and interprets it as the "tribal sorrow" that oppresses Philoctete. Dude has sunstroke but doesn't realize it.
- As he looks at the bundle in the water, he sees the ghost of his father, and it makes him question his own identity.
iii
- By now, the sea-swift has become a messenger from the otherworld, the same bird he saw in the beginning of the poem under the cedars. What can we say? Sunstroke has this affect on people sometimes.
- Achille knows that the bird has come to bring him "home."