Here, a speaker is caught in the grip of a fever and slowly loses touch with the world. The first lines are all haze: senses blur, voices sound far away, and even the sea seems to be murmuring somewhere in the background. Walking is a struggle, steps are unsteady, and the body coughs and shakes. Yet the speaker also longs to drift into "blissful sleep," so the sickness feels both miserable and strangely tempting.
The short, broken lines and repeated "-ing" words (mumbling, stumbling, breaking) mimic the dizzy, stop-start feeling of being ill. When reality starts to feel "like a dream," we sense how far the speaker has slipped from normal life. The mood is woozy and anxious, with a thread of exhaustion running through it. The final couplet is blunt and rhymed: "Illness is going to be, / The death of me." It could be real fear, or a dramatic exaggeration of the kind people make when they feel awful, and the title's joking tone hints at the second reading.