Not Waving but Drowning

The poem qualifies as a lyric: It is short and expresses the personal emotions of the nameless dead man and the unidentified group of people around him. In the authorial/autobiographical context, the poem arguably expresses Smith’s personal ideas about death and how she sometimes felt during her life.

The poem is also something of a parable—a story meant to teach the reader a lesson or illustrate some kind of complex truth. On a literal level, the poem is about a dying person. He is dead because the others thought he was waving at them when he was drowning and needed help. On a figurative level, the poem suggests that outward appearances are often deceiving and that the distress of others can be dangerously easy to overlook or ignore. People might think a person is fine (waving) when they are actually struggling (drowning) and in need of some help.

The poem starts with a declaration, “Nobody heard him, the dead man” (Line 1). The tone is stark. A man is dead, and he might have died because no one was around to communicate with him. In the following line, the speaker uses imagery—a picture—to clarify the condition of the dead man.