Not Waving but Drowning - Stevie Smith

The reason I like this poem, and find it fascinating, is that I can tell there's more than one way to interpret it...there's so many ways for it to be read. In fact, my interpretation of the poem changed from the beginning to the end, and by the end I had an entirely different view of what was going on. By the end, I saw the dead man as someone who had been yearning for attention and tender loving care all this life. The "not waving but drowning" is kind of like a metaphor for him profusely and desperately waving his hands for attention, but since nobody would give it to him, he'd drown in self-pity instead. The coldness that is described, is the coldness one feels when it seems that nobody cares about them. And at the third line of the third stanza, he kind of brings it all together, because he's saying that he was too disconnected from society all his life... he was a loner...kind of sad, really.

I could be entirely wrong though. This doesn't have to be a metaphor, it could be realistic. Maybe there was a guy out in the ocean who wasn't waving to anybody, but trying to signal for help. Either way, it would bounce off my other theory, because nobody cared to find out what was really going on...he drowned anyway.

I don't like the set-up of the second stanza...it's a bit discomforting. It's not balanced or equal. It's a hard stanza to read, because you don't know where to pause to make a good rhyme scheme. I do like when poets put parentheses in their poems...I LOVE parentheses because you can just go astray from your thoughts, or give a little anecdote, without ruining the structure of everything else....parentheses might be my favorite punctuation mark.