A Summary and Analysis of ‘Not Waving But Drowning’

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 knew him: they weren’t strangers who merely observed (and misinterpreted) his last actions as he desperately flailed for help in the waters. Indeed, they knew him well enough to remark that he loved playing around or ‘larking’, and they offer this as an excuse for why everyone misread his flailing arms as a friendly ‘waving’ action.

The syntax cleverly suggests the simple and the childlike: ‘It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way’. Note the missing punctuation between ‘him’ and ‘his’: no colon or comma divides the first clause from the second.

‘They said’, reads the fourth line of this second stanza in its entirety. But when did ‘they’ take over? From the third line in this stanza? Or the first? Like the man’s death itself, the poem’s voices are awash with confusion.

The third and final stanza then gives a voice to the dead man again, who ‘still … lay moaning’: lying not in the sea now, but in his grave; not dying, but dead. When ‘the dead man’ moaned in the first stanza, the wording struck us as odd: he was clearly still alive (though done for) when he ‘lay moaning’ at the start of the poem. But the juxtaposition of ‘the dead man’ and the fact that he was ‘moaning’ made us do a double take: oh, he’s dead now, and he was moaning then.

But in this final stanza, he is moaning from beyond the grave: he really is a ‘dead man … moaning’.

The reworking of ‘I was much further out’ into ‘I was much too far out all my life’ tells us that this is a ghostly voice addressing us, and also broadens out the physical drowning into something more symbolic: cries for help are often mistaken for laughs of good humour; the warning signs that somebody might be suffering or struggling are often misconstrued by those around them.

Analysis

Like many of Stevie Smith’s poems, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ sounds light and comical. The poem’s lines are sprightly and somewhat singsong in both their language and rhythms; this poem is not so far from light verse. The language is clear and straightforward.

And yet the poem’s light, innocent tone hides a darker meaning. Any analysis of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ must acknowledge this, but must also take into account the curious anomalies in punctuation and wording which create this unnerving effect. For example, there is the way the opening line (‘Nobody heard him, the dead man’) renders the drowning man as an afterthought even in the poem itself: he figures first as a ‘him’ before the speaker of the line qualifies this pronoun with a description which only succeeds in defining the man by his eventual fate (‘the dead man’).

Or there is the lack of punctuation in the line about the man’s heart giving way because of the cold. Of course, such a detail can be read as representative of a broader ‘coldness’, and the man’s ‘heart’ can represent not just the physical organ in his chest but the heart as a seat of the emotions. The world was too ‘cold’ and harsh, too lacking in understanding, and this broke his heart.

The poem can, then, be interpreted as an analogy for more philosophical human struggles: we are often ‘drowning’, or struggling, under the weight of cares, worries, anxieties, or stress, but people may assume we are all right, interpreting our metaphorical cries for help as something more upbeat than they actually are.

Form

‘Not Waving but Drowning’ is divided into three stanzas, all of which are quatrains rhymed abcb, although the rhyme in the first and third stanzas, on moaning/drowning, is imperfect: an example of pararhyme or half-rhyme.

This near-miss with the rhyme in these two stanzas subtly reinforces the misunderstanding at the heart of the poem: the witnesses thought they understood the drowned man, but it turns out they misinterpreted his most important gesture, as he was drowning.