16 pages • 32 minutes read
Stevie SmithNot Waving but Drowning
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stevie Smith and Mental Health
The known details from Stevie Smith’s life make it possible to read the poem in an authorial or biographical context. As with the dead man, people may have trouble telling whether Smith was waving or drowning—that is, whether she was happy or experiencing mental health issues or something else. The suicide attempt at her office during the summer of 1953 suggests that Smith experienced deep distress. Like the dead man, she “was much too far out all [her] life” (Line 11). In Stevie: a Biography of Stevie Smith, a doctor declared Smith “under considerable nervous strain” (189). In a letter to a friend quoted in the book, Smith seems to be waving and drowning as she exuberantly declares, “I am a Nervous Wreck, it appears, also anemic, Hurrah!” (189). From an autobiographical angle, it is not hard to fathom why the unidentified people—the unknown group known as “[t]hey” (Line 8)—had a hard time discerning what was going on with the dead person—the dead person had a paradoxical and elusive persona.
In “The Uneasy Verse of Stevie Smith” (The New Yorker, 25 July 2016), Cynthia Zarin describes reading Smith’s varied collection of poems as “Tinkerbell, on a lighthearted day; Ophelia, on a bleak one.” For “Not Waving but Drowning,” the dead man is Ophelia—he is a tragic figure. In an essay, “What Poems Are Made Of,” published in Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (Virago, 1981), Smith addresses the tension between her glee and fascination with death. She writes,
Why are so many of my poems about death, if I am having such an enjoyable time all the time? Partly because I am haunted by the fear of what might have happened if I had not been able to draw back in time from the husband-wives-children and pet animals situation in which I surely should have failed (128).
The haunting atmosphere might have made Smith feel alienated or “further out” (Line 3) and “too cold” (Line 7). The dead man represents people in situations that do not meet their needs. Smith seemingly avoided an apathetic predicament, but, like the dead man, she felt pain and trouble.
Literary Context: Depression and Alienation in English Poetry
Stevie Smith’s varied output makes it hard to pin her to a specific literary context. A Smith poem like “This Englishwoman” (1937) links her to witty authors like Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. “Not Waving but Drowning,” although not completely devoid of irony or humor, puts her in a different context. The poem places her with poets who illustrated the alienation and anguish of 20th-century life, with its deadly world wars and atomizing technological developments. The dead man in Smith’s poem has something in common with the speaker in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). Eliot’s speaker and the dead man struggle with forming connections with others, and the unnamed, rather obtuse group of people in Smith’s poem correlate to the supercilious women that “come and go” (Line 13) in Eliot’s poem.
Although Smith was not a Confessional poet, the overarching subject of mental health links her thematically to American Confessional poets from the mid-20th century, such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Each of these poets had mental health issues and made attempts at dying by suicide. They often addressed mental health issues in their poetry. Plath openly admired Smith’s work and corresponded with her directly.
Smith said she did not read much contemporary poetry, instead citing canonized poets like William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as key influences. Death preoccupied Dickinson, and she also crafted elusive and diverse poetic personas. In the works of Blake and Coleridge, there is frequently an emphasis on inner turmoil and alienation. Similar to the drowning dead man, the speaker in Blake’s “London” (1794) is not in a healthy, positive place. Smith’s preoccupation with alienation and inner turmoil thus links her both to some of her contemporaries while also speaking to an older, virtually continuous tradition of using poetry to address difficult inner states of being.
