Kakistocrat

A decade after writing ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ poet Stevie Smith claimed that her inspiration for it was an occurrence in which a man, believed to be waving to his friends on the shore, drowned.

Despite Stevie’s likely misremembering of the event, she has a deeper goal than simply poeticizing of the news. A psychological complexity is unmasked that allows for a certain Jessica’s simple (but correct) interpretation. She writes that the poem is about "the unanswered plea of an unknown individual who has not been killed physically, but mentally, emotionally…"

The moaning ‘dead’ man who is not heard by those around him should tip the reader to the central character’s feelings of isolation and loneliness. His first words to us (’I was much further out than you thought’) can certainly be read in light of the very literal dead-man drowning framework that Stevie claimed the poem was based on, but at its deeper level, the poem speaks of a man whose sadness, and pain and hurt have had a more powerful effect on his life than those around him realize. What they saw as ‘larking’ (joking) was actually his desperate attempts for attention to be brought to his plight. Even after his ‘death’ they still do not realize their missed opportunities, and they misdiagnose what put him beyond their help.

His heart has given way, as they suggest, but for different reasons. There is a certain emptiness or void brought on that was never filled by those around him who did not recognize his hurts, and now the void cannot be filled.

Though Stevie misremembers the previously referenced news story, her thoughts give the poem a certain perspective that lends to a proper reading. Explaining ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ Stevie writes:

I thought that in a way it is true of life too [for many people] do not feel at all at home in the world [so some] joke a lot and laugh and people think they are quite allright and jolly nice too, but sometimes the brave pretense breaks down, and then, like the poor man in this poem, they are lost.

K.