大象传媒

Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue.

She suffered from depression throughout her life, and wrote several poems around the subject of death. This poem, one of her most famous poems, gives an account of a drowned man whose distressed thrashing in the water had been mistaken for waving.

The poem's simple diction led Clive James to suggest that Smith attempted to write the poem was carefully crafted to appear more simple than it was. James describes the relationship between Smith and the speaker in "Not Waving but Drowning" by saying, "her poems, if they were pills to cure Melancholy, did not work for [Smith]. The best of them, however, worked like charms for everyone else."