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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ is the best-known poem by Stevie Smith (1902-71). In 1995, it was voted Britain’s fourth favourite poem in a poll. First published in 1957, the poem fuses comedy and tragedy, moving between childlike simplicity and darker, more cynical touches. The poem is about a man who is seen flailing his arms about in the sea because he is drowning. But the bystanders who witness this mistakenly assume he is waving rather than gesturing for help, so he drowns. In this post we want to analyse Stevie Smith’s language in this poem, in an effort to get to grips with its meaning. Summary A brief summary of the poem reveals that although it seems simple in meaning, it is anything but. The first stanza tells us that nobody heard the drowning man (his dying moans being retrospectively recounted: he is now ‘the dead man’), yet he continued to cry for help and wave his arms, his desperate flailing mistaken for friendly waving. The first two lines are spoken by some impersonal narrator; the last two lines by the dead man himself. This is a voice from the dead: ‘I was much further out’, not ‘I am’. He is already a goner. Just as he is already described as ‘the dead man’ in the first line, so he is speaking from the grave. The second stanza is spoken by the impersonal narrator again, or at least, this is what we are led to assume. It’s hard to tell. The dead man’s words were not enclosed in helpful quotation marks in the first stanza, so there are no clear markers to tell us who is speaking. The voice in this second stanza (‘Poor chap…’) may be the narrator who began the poem, or it may be the voice of the crowd who witnessed the man’s death but failed to realise he was in trouble. The crucial thing about this stanza is that it adds some surprising context to the first. The people who witnessed the ‘dead man’ as he was drowning actually […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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