Stevie Smith’s recording of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ punches holes into the sea. In her voicing, the dead man whose ‘moaning’ pervades the poem speaks the line ‘Oh, no no no, it was too cold always’ on a rising crescendo that would be at home on the heath in King Lear. Poor bare forked animal with the divine right to howl.  Less moaning than warning: the environment that cannot be survived is the cold and heartless crowd who speak about him without him. His own ‘moaning’, an off-rhyme with ‘drowning’, is all the mourning the dead man will know. The wave-and-sink look of the lineation of the second stanza (second of three) enacts the social isolation that surrounds, perhaps led to, his loss.

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.

The first line is eight syllables long; the second only half that length. The third line is twelve syllables long, taking us ‘far out’ indeed into the blank of the page. Before Stevie Smith lets the fourth line drop, she pauses, much more than you might expect; much more than at other commas or line breaks. She delivers ‘They said’ with unashamed judgment, in a sharp tone like her delivery of the word ‘dead’ in line one of the poem.

Tonally, Smith’s performance sets up a vibration that pings back to the beginning, whereby the saying that ends the second stanza cuts like the death at the very ...