‘Not Waving but Drowning’ – exploring the harrowing depth of Stevie Smith’s ‘seemingly light verse’

Stevie Smith’s ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ is a poem equally as fascinating in structure as disturbing in sentiment. Framed in a tragic paradox of intended and received interpretation of a physical gesture, Smith’s ‘seemingly light verse’ (Linda R. Hallett) exudes satirical depth, timelessly resonating with feelings of alienation and emotional pain. Smith encourages the reader to explore the metaphorical extent of drowning: a situation where one loses control, where words fail, gestures fail and one is rendered incoherent to those who fail to acknowledge the plea for help. Yet also, Smith invites the reader to speculate on her reference to death. Opening the first stanza with ‘Nobody heard him, the dead man, / But still he lay moaning’, Smith raises the question as to whether death is literal in the context of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, or alternatively, if death is a euphemism for a lack of involvement in life and thus the perpetual feeling of being an outsider.

Despite Hallett’s initial observation of Smith’s ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ as ‘seemingly light verse’; she accredits Smith’s ‘sometimes disconcerting mixture of wit and seriousness […], making her at once one of the most consistent and most elusive of poets.’ Through this unique interchangeable tone, Smith impactfully navigates the pathos of the drowning man’s despair along with the performativity of grief from the crowd who witness the scene. Smith incorporates the man’s harrowing personal account into an omniscient narration, his voice cutting through in the first stanza with the admittance that ‘I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning’. However, Smith characteristically undercuts this signal of personal despair with society’s flippant reaction in the second stanza: 

‘Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’ s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   

They said.’

This change in rhythm for the witnesses’ account of the scene invites scepticism through its flippancy of tone and sentiment: Smith’s alternate rhyme with ‘dead’ and ‘said’ encapsulates the disinterest and superficiality of the witnesses in attempting to understand the situation of the ‘dead man’. For instance, who says he ‘loved larking’? Did the crowd even know the man at all? The performative sympathy of the crowd is far from sincere. Yet also, through this word ‘larking’, Smith alludes to the misalignment between how we perceive ourselves and how we present ourselves to others. Characteristically aligned with her poetic fascination with ‘the mysterious, rather sinister reality which lurks behind appealing or innocent appearances’ (Hallett), Smith uses ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ to foreground pain and despair from beneath the facade of jollity and ‘larking’ and thus demonstrate the multifaceted nature of character where perceptions of someone are vastly different from their reality. 

Moreover, despite Smith’s degrading of the flippant witnesses, this collective ‘they’ is sinister in their ability to enforce a predicament onto the drowning man. Smith potentially alludes to the ability of a belief to be accepted due to consensus rather than genuine understanding of the individual and situation. With this in mind, one can examine Smith’s intent in the first stanza in creating a dichotomy of life and death: ‘Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning’. Essentially, the ‘dead man’ is not actually dead. It is the witnesses, and society more generally, who enforce the man’s predicament as ‘dead’ without responding to his cries for help. They continually attempt to justify their lack of action: ‘Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) ’.  Ultimately, the drowning man’s ‘heart gave way’ not due to immersion in the coldness of the water, but instead due to the coldness of society. Through ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, Smith provides a satirical critique of the cold nature of Britain in the 1950s that was unforgiving to a distant character, one who ‘was much too far out [all my life] / And not waving but drowning.’