Shiver Me Timbers

I always saw it as a metaphore for the transcendence of daath.

My body's at home But my heart's in the wind

Both Ahab and Martin Eden were religigously and philosophically conflicted characters that died at sea that only death could bring peace to.

This is a beautiful song, and to me is about Tom trying to be set free from the problems and pain that other people bring, even family and friends, and instead tries to seek peace and solitude. listening to this song is a great release for me when im angry, i just sort of float away...

I don't think this is about suicide except in the most metaphorical of ways. The Martin Eden reference would seem to suggest so, but when he invokes Ahab later that complicates matters. What ties them together is that the both destroyed themselves by failing to settle down, while manically striving for something always just out of reach.

To me, the character in this song is some who always has his foot halfway out the door. His human connections are superficial because he never stays in one place long enough to build them, and that's a vicious cycle that gives him one more reason to move on ("nobody knows me/I can't fathom my stayin'"). Being in motion (or at sea) is the only time he feels like he's someplace familiar ("the clouds are like headlines/in a new frontpage sky"--he can read them like the morning paper--"tears are saltwater"--any emotional connections he builds are eventually reduced to the very stuff of the ocean).

So I read the Eden/Ahab references not as invoking death or suicide, per se, but as the narrator's recognition that, although the peripatetic life is all he knows, it has the potential to ruin him.

I love this song, but I don't think it's really about a life at sea. I think this song is about someone fantasizing about a life at sea. All of the references are fictional and the imagery is dreamlike. There is nothing about real sailors or sailing.

Martin Eden and Captain Ahab are characters from novels, and "Shiver me timbers!" is a pirate exclamation from movies and TV (in the novel Treasure Island, they say "Shiver my timbers"). "Can't fathom my stayin'" is a play on words, as if the guy wants to use all the nautical jargon he's come across. It reminds me of the end of "9th & Hennepin":
"I've seen it all... through the yellow windows of the evening train."

Contrast this with the specificity and loneliness in the lyrics of "Shore Leave".

The song about dying "My body's at home, But my heart's in the wind"

this song means a lot to me.. im in the merchant marine and ill be going out to sea soon, so this is kind of that perfect goodbye song....

One of my favorite Tom Waits songs..I always interpreted it as being about suicide. "nobody knows me can't fathom my stayin" then there's the mention of Martin Eden and Captain Ahab who both died at sea..I could be wrong

I also have interperted this as being about Suicide "Clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky" I.E the headlines that would appear were he to actually go through with it. "tears are like saltwater" is pretty self-explainitory I think.

Also one of my favourites.

Play it at my funeral.

I think he might have returned here in "The ocean doesn't want me today"