Not Waving But Drowning
17 September 2013
Not Waving but Drowning Everyone has experienced at least one missed opportunity in their lives. Whether on the giving end or the receiving end, the hollowness in one’s soul that accompanies a missed opportunity never quite goes away. It haunts you for the rest of your life, if you let it. In Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning, Ms. Smith pieces together a hauntingly beautiful depiction of what it really means to miss out on an opportunity to reach out for help. As a result of that missed opportunity, those in the poem who are affected by it must live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. As we start reading the beginning of the poem, the use of multiple narrators in the first stanza gives the first few lines a conversational feel. It starts out with a 3rd person perspective, and then switches to first person. “Nobody heard the dead man, // But still he lay moaning: // I was much further out than you thought // And not waving but drowning” (Smith, lines 1-2). In the first line, the third person narrator is describing how no one recognized the fact that the “dead man” was struggling, even when he was so desperately trying to communicate his suffering. Additionally, in the second line, the “dead man” seems to reiterate to the first narrator that he was indeed suffering, and that no one realized what was happening. Once the man had died, his cries for help seemed to haunt the people who were closest to him after his death; he “lay moaning” even after he had passed on. The narrator switches again in the second stanza to the second person perspective; perhaps even the “dead man’s” friend giving a eulogy at his funeral. “Poor chap, he always loved larking // And now he’s dead // It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, // They said” (Smith, lines 5-8). Here we can see that the narrator seemed to only know the “dead man” as a cheerful, silly, carefree person, and was shocked to discover that the troubles of
Not Waving but Drowning Everyone has experienced at least one missed opportunity in their lives. Whether on the giving end or the receiving end, the hollowness in one’s soul that accompanies a missed opportunity never quite goes away. It haunts you for the rest of your life, if you let it. In Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning, Ms. Smith pieces together a hauntingly beautiful depiction of what it really means to miss out on an opportunity to reach out for help. As a result of that missed opportunity, those in the poem who are affected by it must live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. As we start reading the beginning of the poem, the use of multiple narrators in the first stanza gives the first few lines a conversational feel. It starts out with a 3rd person perspective, and then switches to first person. “Nobody heard the dead man, // But still he lay moaning: // I was much further out than you thought // And not waving but drowning” (Smith, lines 1-2). In the first line, the third person narrator is describing how no one recognized the fact that the “dead man” was struggling, even when he was so desperately trying to communicate his suffering. Additionally, in the second line, the “dead man” seems to reiterate to the first narrator that he was indeed suffering, and that no one realized what was happening. Once the man had died, his cries for help seemed to haunt the people who were closest to him after his death; he “lay moaning” even after he had passed on. The narrator switches again in the second stanza to the second person perspective; perhaps even the “dead man’s” friend giving a eulogy at his funeral. “Poor chap, he always loved larking // And now he’s dead // It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, // They said” (Smith, lines 5-8). Here we can see that the narrator seemed to only know the “dead man” as a cheerful, silly, carefree person, and was shocked to discover that the troubles of
Cited: Smith, Stevie. "Not Waving but Drowning." 1957. Literature: The Human Experience. 10th ed. Boston/ New York: Bedford/ St. Martin 's, 2010. 152-53. Print.