Not Waving But Drowning -- Stevie Smith

Guest poem submitted by Vikram Doctor, one last
hurrah for the 'poems in movies' theme:

(Poem #1180) Not Waving But Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. -- Stevie Smith

I was surprised to find Minstrels hadn't run this since it's now quite a
well known poem and one that often crops up on websites where people have
collected their favourite poems. But there's only one other Stevie Smith
poem here and perhaps her rather quirky talent deserves more. She can
sometimes be almost tiresomely whimsical, but quite often, as with this
poem, this whimsy cuts through to reveal a bone chilling despair.

I thought this could go in the series of poems in films because I'm pretty
sure its used in 'Stevie' the biopic of her made in 1978 which stars Glenda
Jackson. The film is OK, it started life as a play and one gets the feeling
it must have worked better that way. It's too talky and everything is too
much like a stage set.

But Jackson's performance is good, both sprightly and sad, as one imagines
Stevie must have been. And she plays off very well with the other good
performance from Mona Washbourne as Stevie's 'Lion aunt' with whom she spent
her life. The interaction between the two is really warm and affectionate
and the best part of the film. In the course of it several poems of Stevie's
are quoted, and this I'm sure is one of them.

'The Faber Book of Movie Verse' edited by Philip French and Ken Waschin list
several other films based on the lives of poets, though they say that in
general
"real-life poets have been romanticized in a dotty, sometimes
unintentionally comic fashion." For example they give:

- the Brownings in 'The Barretts of Wimpole Street'
- Shelley & Byron in a prelude to James Whale's "The Bride of Frankenstein'
(egging Mary Shelley on to top her earlier work)
- Ronald Colman as Villon in 'If I Were King'
- Shelley, Byron and co. again having orgies in Ken Russell's 'Gothic'
- Byron alone in 'The Bad Lord Byron' (this sounds so cheesy I really want
to see it now!) and 'Lady Caroline Lamb'
- Rip Torn as Walt Whitman in 'Beautiful Dreamers'
- Swift, Pope and Addison in 'Orlando'
- Oscar Wilde in several films
- Edgar Allan Poe in D. W. Griffith's poem of the same name
- Verlaine and Rimbaud (played by Leonardo DiCaprio!) in 'Total Eclipse'.
(After he achieved teen love god status in Titanic this film became
unexpectedly popular since it has Leo in the nude!)
- Shakespeare in several films
- Ezra Pound in 'The Cage'
- T. S. Eliot in 'Tom and Viv'

Vikram.