Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does the speaker align himself with- the drowning man or the onlookers?

This poem has become popular among English teachers as a class assignment precisely because of the ambiguity of the speaker’s identity. The nature of the confusion over character identity essentially boils down to what Daffy Duck might pose as “pronoun trouble.” It is clearly the narrator of the poem who is speaking the first two lines which identify the dead man as “he.” What remains unclear throughout is the relationship of the speaker to everybody else.