Remembering Rhoda

We start to worry for Rhoda fairly early in The Waves, it seems, as it becomes evident that her hold on ordinary reality is rather tenuous, and as we get intimations that she desires to escape from that reality. There's complexity and poignance to her plight, though, most especially, I find, in that moment when she observes that "there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now" (224). There's something beautiful about that passage, something that suggests that maybe death can be envisioned as something to be embraced, as something that will offer a compensatory reality.

Anyway, this posting comes less from a need to fill in Rhoda's story than to share a wonderful poem. Do you all know Stevie Smith's 1957 poem "Not Waving but Drowning"? We could note the parallel to Woolf's novel in Smith's title, of course, but more importantly we get a kind of vivid mini-drama that suggests a person (consider Rhoda) whose gestures have been tragically misinterpreted throughout his (her) life:

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.

It's a shattering poem when you think about the contrast between the dead man's inner torment and the image of good nature his friends saw in his comings and goings (his "larkings"). Like The Waves, it's a work that suggests many of us don't always feel at home in the world, and that we have to try to convince ourselves and others that we do. And sometimes, alas, we can't call upon that resolve Bernard summons at the end of the novel.