Not Waving but Drowning

The known details from Stevie Smith’s life make it possible to read the poem in an authorial or biographical context. As with the dead man, people may have trouble telling whether Smith was waving or drowning—that is, whether she was happy or experiencing mental health issues or something else. The suicide attempt at her office during the summer of 1953 suggests that Smith experienced deep distress. Like the dead man, she “was much too far out all [her] life” (Line 11). In Stevie: a Biography of Stevie Smith, a doctor declared Smith “under considerable nervous strain” (189). In a letter to a friend quoted in the book, Smith seems to be waving and drowning as she exuberantly declares, “I am a Nervous Wreck, it appears, also anemic, Hurrah!” (189). From an autobiographical angle, it is not hard to fathom why the unidentified people—the unknown group known as “[t]hey” (Line 8)—had a hard time discerning what was going on with the dead person—the dead person had a paradoxical and elusive persona.

In “The Uneasy Verse of Stevie Smith” (The New Yorker, 25 July 2016), Cynthia Zarin describes reading Smith’s varied collection of poems as “Tinkerbell, on a lighthearted day; Ophelia, on a bleak one.