The speaker is a banker who feels he is being killed by his own work, and the poem pictures that as a slow drowning. The money around him is not solid or safe. It is "swirling waters" of notes, and he sinks beneath the "debris of credits and debits" into mud made of greed, broken trust, bribes and fraud. Even the speculation he deals in becomes quicksand, which swallows more the harder you struggle.
The feeling is one of suffocation and helplessness. The short lines like "Myself" and "Sinking" seem to drag the reader down with him. His hopes burst "like bubbles of my breath," which links the last air in his lungs with the dying of his dreams. The title, "Death of a Banker, foretold," suggests this end has been coming for a while.
Then comes the sudden turn: "I dream - / Of snow-capped mountains…" After all the muddy, crowded images, the mountains feel clean, cold and distant. The mood is bleak, but it ends on a quiet longing for purity and escape.