Not Waving But Drowning Analysis

Working Title: “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith – A Criticism of Speechlessness and Lack of Understanding

Apparently, the poem “Not Waving but Drowning” is about the Stevie Smith’s own suicidal thoughts – at least this is a conclusion one is tempted to draw given that the majority of early critics more or less explicitly linked the poem to Smith’s biography (Huk 241). In part, the vast interest in the authors biography is understandable since Smith tried to commit suicide shortly after writing the poem (Marangoni 76-7) and since she stated that “[n]early every poem’s about suicide, more or less”(Dick 44). However, this focus on biographical interpretations has hampered a fruitful discussion of the text itself (Huk 241) and stands

The verbal ambiguity of “waving”, misinterpretable as a “sign of greeting or farewell” instead of a call for help (“wave” OED), acknowledges the social environment’s problems to decode the speaker’s signals and his difficulty to communicate. However, this sympathy for the speaker’s lack of communicative skills is undermined by the structural ambiguity of “not waving”, which suggests that the protagonist’s signals are not just difficult to interpret but that he might be “not waving” and thus not signaling his need for help at all. The credibility of the dead man is further affected by the grammatical ambiguity of “still” (Smith 2), which not only points to the persistence of the his lamenting but also implies that he is captured in motionless passivity and tacit suffering instead of seeking support. “Larking” (Smith 5) also points to a paradigm of dishonesty and deception since it cannot only refer to playing around but also to playing mean tricks on others (“lark” OED). Smith’s specific diction thus points to a certain “meanness of [the dead man’s] character […] that perpetuates [his] laments of neediness, confusion, and alienation” (Civello 43). Furthermore, the dead man’s “moaning” (2) is not only “indicative of physical or mental suffering” but also alludes to the “pleasure” he experiences when “complain[ing] or grumbl[ing] about something trivial” (“moan” OED). The ambiguity thus implies that the dead man is not truly honest about his emotional struggle, but rather deceives his environment by talking about trivialities and that he might even enjoy, in the words of Civello, to “cultivate [his] isolation”