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.
Themes
The Tragic Consequences of Misunderstandings
The title of the poem indicates its central theme: misunderstanding or miscommunication. The poem implies a mix-up with the adverb “not” and the conjunction “but.” Someone thought someone was doing one thing when they were doing another, and the mistake has stark consequences for the poem’s main character, the dead man. Repeating the title, he tells the others, “I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning” (Lines 3-4). Confusion propels the poem: The other people did not understand what was happening to the dead man; they saw his drowning as a wave or a friendly gesture, not a signal of distress.
As “[n]obody heard him” (Line 1), the misunderstanding connects to miscommunication or a blatant lack of listening. For whatever reason, the other people cannot process what the dead man tells them. They think he is dead due to “larking” (Line 5) and the “cold” (Line 7). Smith furthers the theme of miscommunication when the dead man repeats the reasons for his death at the end of the poem, “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning” (Lines 11-12). Minus the misunderstanding about the dead man’s distance and gestures, there is no poem. If the other people saw how far he was and that he was drowning, they could have helped, and then the dead man would have survived. The misunderstanding leads to the man’s death: it has tragic consequences.
The theme of misunderstanding seeps into the grammar of the poem. Smith seems to encourage misunderstanding by jettisoning quotation marks and including attributions at the end or in parentheses. It is as if Smith wants the reader to share in the misunderstanding and experience the conflicting accounts of the event alongside the dead man and the people. The diction sows further misunderstanding: The dead man is not even dead, as he can still speak and articulate his thoughts, yet the others seem unable or unwilling to hear him, rendering death less finite and more abstruse.
The Multiple Ways of Thinking About Death
The poem revolves around the theme of death. The main action, drowning, implies death, and the name of the main central character, “the dead man” (Line 1), reinforces the centrality of death. However, what death is and how it works on a person remains somewhat unresolved.
In the poem, death does not prevent a person from speaking. The dead man tells the people around him, ”I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning” (Lines 3-4). The dead man remains alert and articulate, suggesting that he may be experiencing not a literal death, but a figurative one. Due to his isolation and the misunderstanding, he feels dead—like he is no longer a viable part of human society. When interpreted in this way, the man’s alienation and lack of connection bring on the sensation of death but not death proper.
The group of nameless people adds another angle to the theme. The dead man may be dead because the others treat him as if he is dead by making excuses for not helping him and ignoring what he tells them. That is, they view him as a person without agency. The dead man says one thing, but the people are unable or unwilling to listen. They form their own reasons for his alleged death. They think he died because “he always loved larking” (Line 5) and it “must have been too cold for him his heart gave way” (Line 7). Thus, people can make a person feel dead even if they are still alive.
Another interpretation suggests death is unknowable and largely symbolic. Smith presents death through the symbols of waving and drowning. She does not show the dead man drowning, nor does she present the dead as silent and still. In the poem, the dead person is still conscious and speaking. However, his inability to be heard by the others can also be interpreted as the man speaking from beyond the grave, unbeknownst to the living: From this angle, he is still attempting to communicate in death with a world that never heard him while he was alive.
The Impact of Alienation
The themes of misunderstanding and death connect to the theme of alienation. In a sense, the dead man’s alienation produces misunderstanding and death. The people do not understand what he is saying—or, more frankly, they do not even listen to him—because they do not feel that he is a member of their group or that they have any real responsibility to help him.
The other people compose a “[t]hey” (Line 8) which does not include the dead man. He is “much further out” (Line 3) than the rest of them. The distance between the dead man and the others makes it difficult for the latter to hear his words or perceive his gestures accurately. The isolation pushes the dead man into a separate world. The other people do not understand his language or terrain. There is a gap between them and the dead, and the gulf leads to them ignoring or misperceiving the man’s cries for help. The impact of alienation can be deadly, as the man drowns.
Furthermore, the explanations the group hastily provides for the man’s drowning suggest that they are looking for ways to excuse themselves over their lack of intervention. In speaking of the man’s “larking” (Line 5), they suggest that they did not notice his distress because he always appeared outwardly as mischievous and cheerful to them. In blaming his heart’s inability to handle the “cold” of the water (Line 7), they attempt to shift his cause of death from drowning through lack of assistance to drowning after a heart attack. Their inability to hear the man’s contradictions of their account of his death—or their unwillingness to listen—suggest that the group is more concerned with exonerating themselves than understanding what the man was actually going through and why. The group’s refusal to accept responsibility speaks to a world in which individuals are left to fend for themselves.
Alienation also applies to the poem’s speaker. With their lack of identifying features and nonchalant, factual tone, they keep themselves detached from the poem’s events. Aside from creating the initial image of the dead man lying and moaning, the speaker does not do much except notify the reader who is speaking, and the speaker performs this duty in a careless manner. They do not use quotation marks, and their attributions are sometimes delayed, as if an afterthought, with one attribution even occurring in a parenthesis. This creates the impression that the speaker also does not want to get directly, or even emotionally, involved with what is taking place. They want to stay away from the sad, alienating atmosphere, so they only enter to perform the most basic obligations of a narrator, further deepening the atmosphere of indifference that surrounds the drowned man.
