"While the south rains, the north/ Is snowing, and the dead southerner is taken there." The south is grieving the image of its dead self. The north is all that remains to bury this image. The southerner is "taken" by the train, a tool of the industrial north, away from his homeland to be buried in an icy lake. He is taken, not sent or delivered.
The northern men, wrapped against the cold, business men and working class men move the southerner together. This implies that all classes of the north united to bury the south. This contrasts with rigid southern castes. The northerner's classes are indicated by their headgear, "men in flap-eared caps/ And others with women's scarves tied around their heads/ And business hats over those...." All of them have covered ears, perhaps to shut out the sounds of this death. One of these men moves the hand of the southerner to his breast. This mirrors the pledge of allegiance. After death, the southerner is made to comply with the nationalism of the victor.
The horses drawing the sled are decked with bells. Bells frighten spirits away from their dead bodies. Is this southern pride believing the north still fears it? The south has organic images of farming and people, hot sun and red earth. romantic traditions of pride and chivalry. The south is well kept, hair combed. Its casket is open, observing and aware but still dead. "His dead eyes stare through his lids,/ not fooled that the snow is cotton." The southerner knows he is in a foreign place. The coffin top, the door that separates the body and this reality remains open. The richness of the north -- the bushes protected from the cold, horses, the warmth inside the houses -- all enhance the isolation and poverty of the southerner. The isolation continues on the frozen lake, as flat and smooth as an idealized battlefield.
The ice is opened as a door -- the door to another realm. The otherness of this realm is highlighted by the fish peering into this world. His coffin lid, the door to this life, still open, the southerner is lowered into the next world. He is unloaded "like hay." He is baggage. He is not carried and lifted by pallbearers. His coffin is not even touched. This reads more like southern pride than northern rudeness -- the touch of the northerners would somehow dishonor the southerner.
The dream of the south is then the dream of its idea of itself stolen away by the north and buried anonymously. Defiled traditions, the broken links of heritage, and separation from the land are insults heaped upon its corpse. The northerners have become more "gunny-sacked bushes" coddled and still -- characters stolen by the dream of the south for thier roles. The ghost of the southerner observes as the white coffin's shadow. It observes, the only one really watching, really there, as the south wavers and capsizes in a foreign world.
