What Changed in the Song

It doesn't fit; she lets it stay unresolved; then two different things change. Her effort keeps failing to do what it should: the water keeps rising however hard she works. Then the pause, "I stopped to catch my breath." She stops answering the mismatch with more effort, and leaves it unresolved long enough for something else to come into view. What comes into view is new evidence: his hands, tearing out the patches she has just sealed. That changes her explanation of the cause. A separate change follows: "I was always free to let it go." That one revises the assumption that keeping the boat afloat was hers to do. Seeing the hands didn't make that second change; it made room for it.

The water doesn't stop and nothing repairs itself. The contradiction, the pause, the new evidence and the revised assumption are four different things, and the song doesn't treat them as a fixed sequence that everyone passes through.

Three ways to respond to something that keeps going wrong, all of which the song passes through: try harder (row harder, bail, patch every crack); ask what you are trying to do ("I stopped to catch my breath, looked across the deck"); and question the rule underneath ("gravity was only a law I never questioned").