Not Waving, But Drowning’, Loyle’s new album, gives yet more evidence – as if it were needed – of his razor-sharp flow and his unique storytelling ability. Over the last few months he has disarmed packed rooms of rowdy concert goers, leaving them silent as they hold fast to every syllable sung. Note the missing punctuation between ‘him’ and ‘his’: no colon or comma divides the first clause from the second. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 8, 1980, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 44, 1987.

From below the surface oddness, her personal voice comes out to us as something questing, discomfiting, compassionate. The passage that [Poetry] blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood; but she can come out softly.Contributor of poetry to numerous anthologies, including Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Verse, 2nd edition, 1965, and Poetry 1900 to 1965, 1967.

The bedrock of honest and raw sentimentality that you heard on Yesterday’s Gone left an inextinguishable mark on music in general and UK Hip Hop in particular, standing out as an ageless, bulletproof debut. The syntax cleverly suggests the simple and the childlike: ‘It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way’.The poem can, of course, be interpreted as an analogy for more philosophical human struggles: we are often ‘drowning’, or struggling, under the weight of cares, worries, anxieties, or stress, but people may assume we are all right, interpreting our metaphorical cries for help as something more upbeat than they actually are. Not Waving, But Drowning’ follows Loyle’s BRIT (Best Male, Best Newcomer) and Mercury Prize nominated, top 20 debut ‘Yesterday’s Gone’.

Most selected it for its length and what they assumed to be its clarity, but upon memorization and the process of understanding that I encouraged to follow in turn, many came away with yet another example of a great metaphor. Not Waving but Drowning’, like many of Stevie Smith’s poems, sounds light and comical, singsonglike and sprightly, yet hides a darker meaning. Loyle refers to real life for everything, the title of ‘Yesterday’s Gone’ came from a song of his step father, the title of his new album ‘Not Waving, But Drowning’ comes from a poem by his grandfather, which in turn came from a Stevie Smith poem. The voice in this second stanza (‘Poor chap…’) may be the narrator who began the poem, or it may be the voice of the crowd who witnessed the man’s death but failed to realise he was in trouble.

Not Waving, But Drowning, Loyle’s new album, gives yet more evidence - as if it were needed - of his razor-sharp flow and his unique storytelling ability.

The first stanza tells us that nobody heard the drowning man (his dying moans being retrospectively recounted: he is now ‘the dead man’), yet he continued to cry for help and wave his arms, his flailing mistaken for friendly waving. I must admit that I'd never heard of Smith until reading this site and had recently shied away from 'Not Waving but Drowning' because it just didn't seem to make sense. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no ‘school’—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.Not Waving but Drowning" is the most famous poem by British poet Stevie Smith, and was first published in 1957. In their character descriptions, they should indicate the relationship to the victim that each speaker might have. You can read the poem here, but in this post we want to analyse Stevie Smith’s language in this poem, in an effort to get to grips with its meaning.