SARAH:  Ophelia made a wreath of flowers and attempted to hang it on the branches of the willow.  While doing so, she slipped and fell into the brook.

RALPH:  Gertrude describes how her clothing spread out over the surface of the water, keeping her afloat for a moment, while she sang songs of praise, or perhaps hymns.

SARAH:  Gertrude offers two different visions here of Ophelia singing as she sinks into the water — the first is of someone unaware of her life-threatening danger, and seems to convey Ophelia's actual state.  After all, the young woman has gone mad, and apparently did nothing to try and escape her watery death.

RALPH:  The second image of Ophelia that Gertrude proposes is as if she were "a creature native and endued unto that element" — in other words, as if Ophelia were a water nymph, or, as Gertrude said a few lines earlier, a mermaid, who fits in so well with this scene that it’s as if she belonged there, as if it were her home.

SARAH:  Ophelia continues to float on the surface of the water for just a brief moment — then her clothing becomes waterlogged and pulls her under.

RALPH:  These two images of Ophelia in fact are complementary — Ophelia is tragically unaware that she is about to die, and yet visually she also seems at home here in this brook, as her madness has finally taken her completely out of her unhappy situation back at the court.

SARAH:  That's right, Ralph — part of what makes this scene so poignant is that Ophelia no longer belongs anywhere among the living — her father is dead, and her lover has been brutally unkind to her — it's not clear what her future would have been had her life not ended here.