‘All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication’ [Stevie Smith]
‘Not Waving but Drowning’ pulls off a strange trick. It is a poem that speaks to the outsider and yet, it has become one of Britain’s most popular poems. Of course, this suggests something deeper about the human condition – that we are all ill at ease and isolated. To be human is to be ‘too far out’, psychologically. We are all, as the expression goes, ‘at sea’ in our lives.
In the following short clip, Stevie Smith reads her deceptively simple poem, briefly beginning with an outline of its initial inspiration:
Sharp, tender, spiky, a total original, I have long loved Stevie Smith’s poetry. Yet, recently, I discovered her drawings too:
The picture that illustrates ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ seems to work slightly against the text of the poem. The girl is not waving, nor drowning, nor is she dead, nor a man, as the poem depicts. With her hair still over her face, it is as if she has been under the water and then has changed her mind and quickly bobbed up again. It is a funny image and yet look at the seriousness in her eyes. She is still somewhere else, in a world of her own (as suggested by the strange bubble around her head). Is she looking toward that other world (death) that she has been tempted by?
‘I love life. I adore it, but only because I keep myself well on the edge.’ [Stevie Smith]
I simply had to include a further short video of her poem ‘The Blue from Heaven’.
I love the reading by Glenda Jackson, who has caught perfectly the voice of the poem, and the animation of Stevie Smith’s own scratchy little drawings is just inspired!
