Student Question
How does Stevie Smith create horror, sympathy, and discomfort in the poem “Not Waving but Drowning”?
Quick answer:
Stevie Smith creates horror, sympathy, and discomfort in "Not Waving but Drowning" through ambiguity and indirect storytelling. The poem's vagueness about the speaker's relationship to the dead man and the circumstances of his death evokes discomfort. The dead man's "moaning" suggests unresolved horror, while the speaker's guilt and alienation intensify sympathy. The poem's paradox and lack of clarity about life and death deepen the reader's uneasiness, creating a haunting sense of irrational mystery.
Stevie Smith leaves out much of the background of the incident alluded to in this poem. Perhaps the most crucial element of what we, as readers, have to fill in is the relation of the speaker to the dead man.
The most conventionally disturbing feature, beyond this mystery, is our being told the dead man was "moaning." Does it mean that he isn't really dead? The first stanza contains a secondary self-contradiction, for if nobody heard the man, how do we know that he was moaning?
It would appear the speaker is blaming herself for the man's death, while simultaneously denying she's responsible. At the start she's defensive, claiming to have been too far out to have heard the moaning, but apparently having heard it anyway. Is it horror, or merely "discomfort" the reader feels upon being told this? Whatever the precise word for our reaction, it is due chiefly...
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to the vagueness, the indirect way of stating what has actually occurred that the speaker gives us while claiming that she had nothing to do with the death:
I was much further out than you thought,
And not waving but drowning.
An air of indifference is coupled with guilt on the speaker's part. This, and the need to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the death, together create a feeling that at least approaches horror. If we were simply told directly that the man drowned, we would feel empathy, but the lack of a real accounting of the details increases our pity and our sense that some added, painful terror lurks beneath the simple fact of a death. The speaker may be indirectly confessing that she in fact caused his death. The entire second stanza is a run-on sentence, with the third line of particular significance:
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
In the final stanza we're told again that the speaker was "not waving but drowning." But the added thought here is that she was "too far out all my life." It changes the physical situation of the speaker into a metaphor in which remoteness means a disconnect between her and not only the moaning dead man, but between her and the world overall. The underlying meaning is that of alienation, the speaker's condition of otherness, and this adds to our sense of all three states of mind named in your question: sympathy, discomfort and horror.
All of these factors create a cumulative sense of losing one's bearings during the brief course of the poem. A man drowns, or rather, dies from the cold. He's dead but making inarticulate sounds. The speaker is "too far out," and is not waving but drowning, though now she's still alive. We don't know precisely what the connection is between the waving and drowning on one side, and the man's death on the other. The poem in its entirety is a paradox, and a simple but still puzzling metaphor about the inexplicable nature of life and death. Again, the absence of any filling in of the blanks leads to a feeling of uneasiness on the reader's part, but an uneasiness that grows into a horror in the face of this irrational mystery with which we're confronted.