| has gloss | eng: "Not Waving but Drowning" is a poem by British poet Stevie Smith published in 1957 as part of a collection of the same title. The work, which is the most famous of Smiths poems, describes a man whose distressed thrashing in the sea causes onlookers to believe that he is waving to them. The poem was accompanied by one of Smiths drawings, as was common among her works. The sketch differs from the poem in that the figure is of a woman rather than a man, and Smith scholar Laura Severin suggests that the figure might be Mary, a character in another poem by Smith titled "Cool as a Cucumber". The drawing was also used as the accompanying image for the poem "The Frozen Lake" in Selected Poems, a self-edited compilation of Smith's works published in 1962. |
