Dig beneath the surface of this jaunty little poem and a tale of dark despair comes into view. The drowned man's larking, his washed up body, the innocent bystanders - none of them are what they first appear.
The idea of water being used as a symbol for the unknown, the chaotic and unmanageable depths of life is as old as the story of Genesis. Chapter 1 Verse 2 states: ‘The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ Whatever those waters are, they’re not physical because the waters of the earth haven’t yet been created in Genesis. They’re the unimaginable depths, the chaos out of which order is formed.
Every culture on Earth (almost) has a version of a Flood Myth: the idea that waters (whether they be symbolic or real) will come again and wreak havoc and destruction is as ols as Noah’s Ark, or the Hindu version where Matsya Avatar of the Vishnu warns the first man, Manu, of the impending flood.
Not only are waters used as a symbol for chaos in society but also for chaos in an individual’s life. When Jonah loses his way, or fails to follow his calling, he’s tossed overboard into the raging sea. Literary and metaphorically he’s thrown from the safety of his life boat into the depths of the water. Sound familiar?
So when Stevie Smith uses the metaphor of drowning to symbolize someone struggling or out of their depth, she’s using an age-old literary symbol that we’re all familiar with. The twist in this poem, is not struggle of the drowning man, it’s the lack of empathy shown by the bystanders to highlight the superficiality of our relationships. It seems although we have many things in the 21 century, intimate connections and a sense of community are not among them. Let’s look at the poem in detail.
The first thing to notice is there are three speakers in the poem: The traditional speaker, is marked with green font because he appears quite neutral. The Dead Man is in black – because, well, he’s dead! And the Bystanders are in blue because they seem cold or at least indifferent.
Let’s take a look at the speaker’s opening lines: ‘Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:’ Someone has died but the line is delivered with a matter-of-fact tone. To understand this, contrast it with Wordsworth’s speaker in She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways from the same collection: that speaker laments, ‘But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!’ That’s very different. Smith’s speaker seems emotionally disconnected. He’s not necessarily focused on the death either. The opening clause: ‘Nobody heard him,’ emphasises the response, or rather, lack of response from friends and society. The death comes second, in parenthetical commas, the dead man, meaning he’s additional information to the sentence that can be removed. Smith use punctuation here highlights how superficial our connection to the dead man is. He can be removed from the sentence!
The second line has a degree of ambiguity to it. In terms of tone, is the speaker neutral, reporting the fact, ‘But still he lay moaning:’ or is the speaker complaining, ‘but still he lay moaning’? Furthermore ‘moaning’ is ambiguous. It’s most likely utterances of pain from the dead man, but it could be the complaints, the grumbles the dead man made during his life that went ignored or unheeded.
Citations:
Music - Cantus Firmus Monks Doug Maxwell/Media Right Productions
Youtube audio library: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/...
Images:
1. Swim cap and goggles
https://www.needpix.com/photo/1017924...
2. Hand: geralt / 21208 images https://pixabay.com/photos/hand-sea-w...
3. Sea: Sabel Blanco https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of....
4. Gif: stormy sea: https://tenor.com/view/storm-raging-s...
5. Sea: enriquelopezgarre https://pixabay.com/photos/storm-sea-...
Noah’s Arc: Abbey Church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe / Public domain
6. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
7. Matsya protecting Svayambhuva Manu and the seven sages at the time of the great deluge, a painting by Ramanarayanadatta astir. (Public Domain/ Wikimedia Commons)
8. Jonah and the Whale, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh Metropolitan Museum of Art / Public domain
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
9. Social exclusion: https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-fr...
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