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Alienation
In Stevie Smith's poem "Not Waving but Drowning," a man drowns and no one helps him because they think he is just waving at them. He cries out for help, too, but "nobody heard him," (line 1). Because he loved to joke around, too, no one believed that his moaning meant anything. No one cares enough to take the man seriously. The poem is therefore as much a comment on the spectators as it is on the dead man. The narrator of the poem has a detached tone, and refers to the man not by name but as "poor chap." The detached narrator helps to promote the theme of alienation that is central to "Not Waving but Drowning."
The act of drowning, and floating away at sea, is a symbol of alienation. By floating away by himself, the man makes himself a genuine island. He is cut off from land and from his fellow human beings. Because of the double meaning of the word "wave," it is likely that the poet intends for the reader to imagine the man drowning...
It takes both the man and the community to participate in the creation of alienation. The man went swimming by himself and when he gets caught in a current, he has no one he can count on. Moreover, the man is never referred to by name. His anonymity signifies social isolation, just as his being all alone does. The narrator does not mention that he has any family who cared about him, and using the word "poor" suggests that the dead man was poor in terms of lacking social connections.
At the same time, the narrator admits to knowing enough about the man to know that he "always loved larking," (line 5). To say he "always" loved larking means that the man had been in the community a long time. The narrator is the voice of the community, rather than one individual. As the community, the narrator represents complicity in the death…
Work Cited
Smith, Stevie. "Not Waving but Drowning." Retrieved online: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175778
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