One thing we can say for sure is that the speaker of the "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" has got a vivid imagination, he hears the sounds of the ocean, and decides that the ocean is talking. He sees a traveler walking along the shore, and determines that this guy is probably a goner. When you think about, actually, that's not very much of a stretch. As bummed as we are to admit it, everyone who lives—sooner or later—is eventually a goner. The speaker does have a knack for taking little bits of information and making just a little more out of it, though—the waves of the ocean aren't just waves, they're "soft, white hands," the shore is "damp and brown."
An observant guy with a pretty vivid imagination, eh? Hey, it's almost like the speaker is a poet or something, right? Well, now that we think about it, that makes perfect sense because the reality is the speaker of this poem really does remind us a whole lot of the poem's author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. We know, we know—it's never a good idea to confuse a poem's speaker with its author, but bear with us for just a second.
Longfellow wrote "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls" in 1879, three years before his death in 1882. Longfellow probably didn't know for sure that he would die three years later, but like a lot of older people, he probably had a feeling that his days were numbered. In 1879, after all, he was already 72 years old, and in those days, that was pretty darn old (it's not like nowadays, where 72 is like the new 55). In the dedication to Ultimate Thule (the volume in which "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls appeared), Longfellow is very well aware that he is old, that he is very "far" from the "land of dreams" that was his childhood. Given this, it's all too tempting to say that the traveler walking along the shore is Longfellow himself, slowly walking away from the ocean of mortal life towards a town that symbolizes a new chapter, even as it also symbolizes death.