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“Not Waving but Drowning” Introduction
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"Not Waving but Drowning" is the most famous poem by British poet Stevie Smith, and was first published in 1957. The poem describes a drowning man whose frantic arm gestures are mistaken for waving by distant onlookers. On a less literal level, the poem speaks to the isolation and pain of being misunderstood, and is a kind of parable about the distance between inner feelings and outward appearance.
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Summary
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The speaker opens by declaring that no one could hear the dead man, who was still, paradoxically, lying there and crying out in pain. A first person speaker, perhaps the dead man himself (the poem is deliberately ambiguous), then interjects: "I was always a lot further away than people realized—and I wasn't waving at people back on land; I was moving my arms about because I was drowning."
The crowd then talks about the dead man, saying how unfortunate he was to die while playing about in the water—and how he had a such a playful nature while he was alive. These people theorize that he died from the cold, his heart simply too weak to stand it.
The first person speaker interjects again, saying that it definitely wasn't the cold that did it—because, in fact, it was always too cold. (In a parenthetical aside, it's revealed that the dead man is still lying out in the water and crying out in pain.) The speaker (again, perhaps meant to be paradoxically taken as this dead man himself) restates that he'd always been far away from everyone else, for his entire life—and that all this time his movements hadn't been him waving to people, but rather the sign of him drowning.
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Themes
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Communication and Misunderstanding
A playful and light-hearted tone masks a serious subject in “Not Waving but Drowning.” On the surface the poem is about a man who drowns because his movements are mistaken for friendly waving by people ostensibly back on shore. Taken less literally, however, the poem speaks to the pain of being misunderstood and the frequent failure of communication between human beings.
The poem begins by drawing the reader’s attention to “the dead man,” who has just drowned. But strangely—even paradoxically—he is still “moaning,” or crying out in pain, though no one (except, of course, for the reader) can hear him. Immediately, then, the poem sets up a breakdown in communication.
The poem also moves between pronouns throughout—referring to the dead man in the third person, before switching over to the first person "I" and back again. The "I" could refer to the dead man; a separate speaker; or even the poet herself. It’s hard to know for sure who the speaker is, there are no quotation marks to clarify who is speaking when, and nobody can hear the man—who's dead, and thus shouldn't be speaking, anyway! The poem is intentionally ambiguous and unreliable, underscoring its argument about the way communication works—or, more accurately, doesn’t work.
If this "I" is taken as the dead man himself, then he is somehow commenting on his life from beyond the grave. And he explains that his own death was, in part, caused by this kind of failure to be understood. He was far “out” in the water and, accordingly, people mistook his flailing arms—a call for help—for “waving.” Because they thought he was playing around, no one tried to save him. There's a total disconnect between the message that the man intended to send and the one that people actually received.
After this initial set-up, the poem presents two different takes on what happened to the man—what the crowd on the shore thinks, and what the man says himself. The disparity between these takes is stark: the crowd thinks the water must have been too cold for the man's heart to handle, but the man denies this theory, insisting that, in fact, the water had “always” been too cold (meaning this time was no different).
Instead, it was the distance between himself and the nearest help that actually killed him. “I was much too far out all my life,” the man says, and this distance led to his being fatally misunderstood in his moment of need.
Of course, this can be read allegorically as representing emotional distance; the man isn't literally swimming all the time. If the man had been emotionally closer to others, they might have understood him better, and he wouldn’t have died in this way. The crowd had a certain idea of who this man was, and such assumptions blinded them to the reality of what was actually happening.
That is, this man might have seemed totally happy from the outside—after all, he supposedly “always loved larking”—but inside he actually felt completely disconnected from those in his life. Communication failed to bridge this gap—his actions made people think he was happy, when actually he was close to death. There is an implicit argument here that people should strive to listen to others more intently, because the poem seems to suggest that this kind of disconnect is common—perhaps even that failing to be understood by others is, sadly, a central part of being alive.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-12
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Mental Illness and Isolation
Closely related to the poem's thematic treatment of communication and misunderstanding is its potential allusion to mental illness. That is, the poem can be taken as an extended metaphor or allegory for the specific pain and isolation of diseases like depression—which make the man feel like he is "drowning" yet unable to effectively ask for help. It's worth noting here that Smith herself struggled with depression for much of her life, and her own experiences likely informed the poem. The man's mistaken gestures, in this reading, suggest the divide between appearances and reality, between how people dealing with such illnesses are feeling internally and how the world sees them and/or how they present themselves to the world.
Drowning—with its insinuation of suffocation and crushing pressure—is often used to metaphorically represent the weight of mental illness. The man's disease makes him feel as though he is drowning, and the fact that he is "much further out than" people think implies that those around him have no idea how much he is struggling, how deeply depressed—and how close to the figurative edge—he really is.
Indeed, the crowd theorizes that the "cold" simply caused the man's heart to give out, but the man then adamantly insists that "it was too cold always." Taken metaphorically, he's saying that he always felt alone, discomforted; emotional warmth was never part of his experience. That the crowd believes the man to have "always loved larking" is thus tragically ironic, a testament to others' total inability (or, interpreted less generously, refusal) to understand the inner emotional turmoil of another human being.
In this interpretation of the poem, the man's distance from the world is the direct result of his internal anguish, as his illness has prevented him from emotionally connecting with those around him even if he wanted to do so. The poem thus suggests that part of the horror and pain of mental illness is feeling so distant and isolated from other people that even one's cries for help go unheard.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-12
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Not Waving but Drowning”
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Lines 1-2
Nobody heard him, ...
... he lay moaning:"Not Waving but Drowning" opens in deadpan style, with Smith immediately introducing both the poem's main theme (about communication and misunderstanding) and its main character (the "dead man"). Readers don't yet know where exactly this "dead man" is, though the poem's title suggests that he is in a body of water.
This first line also sets up the poem's central paradox—the attempt (in vain) by the dead man to explain his situation. The tense here is striking: the man is already presented as "dead," yet he is "still ... moaning." On the one hand, the use of the word "still" suggests that maybe the man still could be saved, if only someone were listening. The finality of the man being dead, however, contrasts with the urgency of "still" and creates an uneasy sense of futility. Even though the man is "still" moaning, it is too late to do anything about it; he will moan and moan, and nothing will change.
The word "still" can also be thought of as linking the dead man's moaning across different points in time—between his death and this weird, limbo-like afterlife he seems to now inhabit, and then also between the poem's present moment and this man's his entire life (as referred to in line 11 with "I was waving much too far out all my life"). In other words, perhaps the man has always been "moaning."
Moaning can mean two different things here, and Smith allows for both definitions. It can refer to complaining, which is certainly relevant to the dead man's frustrations with being misunderstood, but it also relates to sounds made in pain. The seeming contradiction between being "dead" and "moaning" can be understood as representative of the unheard expressions of pain from people who are suffering and in need of help. These cries are of no use because no one can hear them, but the doomed cry out anyway.
Alliteration in the first phrase—"Nobody heard him"—gives the line the sound of breathlessness and of exasperation, both of which are relevant to the dead man's situation (breathlessness because he drowned, and exasperation because he is/was frustrated at people's inability to understand him). There's also some consonance on the /m/ sound in these first lines, which links "him," "man," and "moaning"—essentially connecting the man directly to his agony.
Finally, the opening also puts the reader in a kind of privileged position in the sense that they can understand what the dead man is trying to communicate—while the gathered crowd within the poem itself are none-the-wiser.
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Lines 3-4
I was much ...
... waving but drowning.
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Lines 5-8
Poor chap, he ...
... They said. -
Lines 9-10
Oh, no no ...
... one lay moaning) -
Lines 11-12
I was much ...
... waving but drowning.
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Not Waving but Drowning" uses alliteration sparingly throughout. The first example is in line 1:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
These two /h/ sounds have an exasperated, breathy quality to them. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, it relates to the frustration felt by the dead man at how he's always been misunderstood, even in death. Secondly, with the focus on breath, it also relates to the way to the mention of drowning (and death as taking the final breath).
The next example is line 5:
Poor chap, he always loved larking
This line is spoken by the crowd gathered around the dead man—the people who misunderstand both his death and the way he was during his lifetime. The playfulness of the two alliterating /l/ sounds (further supported by the consonance of "always") is ironic, because elsewhere in the poem the dead man desperately tries to communicate how he never "loved larking" (playing about)—or, at least, that his desperation was mistaken for friendliness and playfulness. In other words, he was "not waving but drowning" all his life.
In line 7, the poem returns to the /h/ sound mentioned above. This carries the same meaning, but is intensified: "him his heart gave way[.]" These /h/ sounds here are panicked and frantic, like the final moments before death.
Line 9 uses epizeuxis in the repeated "no," but this also creates an alliterative effect that emphasizes the word—and, in turn, stresses just how wrong everybody was about the man and his character.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “heard him”
- Line 5: “loved larking”
- Line 7: “him his heart”
- Line 9: “no no no”
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Asyndeton
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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Epizeuxis
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Paradox
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Moaning
- Larking
Moaning-
(Location in poem: Line 2: “moaning”; Line 10: “moaning”)
Moaning primarily means one of two things: complaining, or making noises to express suffering. Its use here works with both main definitions of the word. The dead man's words are a kind of complaint, but also a noise made in pain.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Not Waving but Drowning”
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Form
As with most of Stevie Smith's poetry, "Not Waving but Drowning" masks complex and dark subject matter with an apparently simplistic form. The poem consists of twelve lines divided equally into three four-line stanzas (quatrains), a common and recognizable stanza form.
This apparent mismatch between the subject—miscommunication and death—and form actually helps establish the poem's main theme. That is, the easy, clear form seems almost wrong for what is being discussed. The poem's form thus reflects the poem's thematic treatment of communication and misunderstanding, as it opens the poem itself up to being oversimplified and misunderstood.
It's also notable the way that the lines 4 and 12 are exactly the same—and that they also repeat the title:
And not waving but drowning.
This repetition gives the poem a kind of circular, inescapable logic—as though the reader is also trapped inside the dead man's predicament.
Finally, the stanza form also approximates the sound of the ballad stanza; this aspect of the poem is covered in the "Rhyme Scheme" section of this guide.
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Meter
The meter in "Not Waving but Drowning" is mixed, never quite settling into a regular rhythm. It can thus be thought of as free verse, with the lack of strict meter reflecting the poem's conversational, casual tone—a tone that is distinctly at odds with the dark subject matter at hand.
The poem thus plays with a tension between the breezy sound of light verse (e.g., the kind used by Lewis Carrol and Edward Lear) while also disrupting that sense of flow in a few key moments. Generally speaking, most metrical feet in the poem are either iambic (da-DUM) or anapestic (da-da-DUM).
Both types of feet play an important role in the poem. Take the mostly anapaestic speech from the dead man in lines 3 and 4:
I was much | further out | than you thought |
And not wav- | ing but drown- | ing.The sound of the anapests here is intentionally playful, which is at odds with the serious point that the dead man is trying to make. In this way, the poem subtly builds its argument about the unreliability of communication by creating this tension between what is said and the vehicle for saying it.
In terms of iambs, line 7 is probably the most significant example (quoted with line 8):
It must | have been | too cold | for him | his heart | gave way,
They said.Line 7 is by far the longest in the poem, and is technically a line of iambic hexameter (meaning there are six iambic feet in the line). The main effect is to render the sound of a heartbeat, each da-DUM helping to represent the dead man's final moments. The single-footed line 8 is a kind of release of tension, but also makes the previous line feel less serious—perhaps reflecting that the members of the crowd who speak line 7 don't really care that deeply about the dead man.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Not Waving but Drowning" roughly follows the rhyme scheme of a ballad stanza: ABCB. This gives the poem a playful sound that works in tension with the serious and dark subject matter. The way that the rhymes chime together is, in itself, a kind of "larking"—of playing around in a carefree manner. This love of larking, of course, is something that the dead man strongly denies—he feels he was misunderstood all his life, and is even misunderstood still in death.
Take the first stanza:
... man, A
... moaning: B
... thought C
... drowning. B"Moaning" and "drowning" are not full rhymes, of course, but the way they appear in stanza 1 and stanza 3 lends them extra emphasis. This helps heighten the bleakness of the poem, putting weight on the word "drowning" especially. The "dead" and "said" rhyme in the second stanza is extremely simple, which helps make the man's deadness all-the-more matter of fact.
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Speaker
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The question of who is speaking is one of the most interesting aspects of "Not Waving but Drowning." The poem opens with a third-person description of the scene: a dead man lies moaning and unheard. But the colon at the end of line 2 suggests that lines 3 and 4 are spoken by the dead man himself—that the "I" is in fact his voice.
Then, without warning, the poem switches voice back to a "he" in line 5:
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And then to a "they" in line 8—a reference to a gathering of people who are perhaps on the shore where the man died, or at his funeral, or just a kind of mix of people he knew through his life. The poem then returns to the first-person in the final stanza, though the parenthetical line 10—"Still the dead one lay moaning"—represents another third-person interjection.
Confused? That's part of the point. All in all, the poem toys with the reader's understanding of the speaker, switching it up with very little warning or ceremony. This speaks to the poem's focus on the inherently unstable nature of communication in general.
Some critics also draw a link between the first-person speaker in the poem and Stevie Smith herself. That is, the "I" throughout the poem might be taken as the poet speaking, rather than the dead man talking from beyond the grave.
Furthermore, there is something that feels quite general about the final stanza—as though these are words that apply more widely than to one specific individual. In other words, the poem deals with a more general feeling common to the human experience: the disconnect between inner feeling and outer expression.
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“Not Waving but Drowning” Setting
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"Not Waving but Drowning" spends very little time on drawing out its setting. The main clue to the setting is "drowning," which suggests some kind of coastline environment (when coupled with the fact that people seem to be close enough to comment on what has happened). Essentially, on a literal level, the poem seems to take place on aa coast; out in the deep water is the drowning man, while other people remain on shore.
But the setting is intentionally ambiguous and mysterious in this poem, mixing up a possible literal reading with the more allegorical discussion of emotional coldness and social distance. That is, this physical setting can be taken as a representation of the way individuals may feel isolated from and unable to communicate with other people. The man in the water represents the isolated individual, while the crowd on the shore represents the rest of society.
It's also worth noting that the time period of the poem is ambiguous too. While on one level the poem seems to be about a specific moment in time, the dead man's words in the third stanza broaden the discussion to include his entire life. The difficulty that the reader has in establishing a secure sense of time and place is part of the poem's general exploration of miscommunication.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Not Waving but Drowning”
Literary Context
Stevie Smith was a British poet who lived from 1902 to 1971. Her verse is often characterized by an unsettling mixture of lightness and darkness: while her subject matter is often bleak and hard-hitting, most of her poems have a breezy, whimsical kind of sound. That is certainly the case with this particular poem.
"Not Waving but Drowning" was published in the collection of the same name in 1957, and is by far the most well-known of Smith's poems. Like a number of her other poems, this one mixes a vision of death with dark humor. Likewise, the poem as it was published in the collection was more ambiguous about its central character than a first reading might suggest. Smith often accompanied her poems with simple line drawings, and the drawing that goes with “Not Waving but Drowning” shows a woman with a vague expression (not dissimilar, though much simpler, to the Mona Lisa). In its focus on the disparity between inner feeling and outer appearance, "Not Waving but Drowning" can also be compared to Smith's "Deeply Morbid."
Historical Context
In truth, "Not Waving but Drowning" doesn't have much of a historical context—it talks in quite general terms about its subject matter, and doesn't have any specific ties to a particular time or place (apart from "chap," which makes the poem seem like its located in England).
The disconnect between how someone feels inside and how others perceive them is an age-old subject for literature and philosophy. This links in with the philosophical concept of solipsism, which suggests that the only thing someone can truly verify is their own mind. The concealment of emotion is nothing new, and the poem gives a sense that the “dead man” has been putting on a brave face throughout his life. This has a historical precursor in the Victorian concept of the “stiff upper lip”—a resolute lack of emotional outburst when faced with difficult circumstances. While there is more of a drive in the 21st century to encourage people to speak about their emotions, suffering in silence remains extremely common too.
Given the poem's possible interpretation as being about the pain and isolation of mental illness, it's worth noting that Smith herself suffered from depression and had a morbid fascination with death for much of her life.
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More “Not Waving but Drowning” Resources
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External Resources
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Smith's Illustrations — The line drawing that accompanies the poem.
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Playing Smith — An interview with actress Glenda Jackson, who played Stevie Smith on stage.
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Smith's Life and Work — More information about Smith's biography and poetry from the Poetry Foundation.
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Smith Reads Her Poem — Listen to Smith recite "Not Waving but Drowning."
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"Making It New" — A documentary clip featuring Smith discussing her poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Stevie Smith
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