Not Waving but Drowning Not Waving but Drowning "Not Waving but Drowning" is a poem by the British poet Stevie Smith. It was published in 1957 as part of a collection of the same title. The most famous of Smith's poems, it gives an account of a drowned man whose distressed thrashing in the water had been mistaken for waving. The poem was accompanied by one of Smith's drawings, as was common in her work. The poem's personal significance has been the topic of several pieces of literary criticism because Smith was treated for psychological problems. She contemplated suicide at the age of eight
Death Be Not Proud (poem) Death Be Not Proud (poem) Sonnet X, also known by its opening words as "Death Be Not Proud", is a fourteen-line poem, or sonnet, by English poet John Donne (1572–1631), one of the leading figures in the metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century English literature. Written between February and August 1609, it was not published during Donne's lifetime; it was first published posthumously in 1633. It is included as one of the nineteen sonnets that comprise Donne's "Holy Sonnets" or "Divine Meditations", among his most well-known works. Most editions number the poem as the tenth in the sonnet sequence, which follows the