while ingrid hotz-davies suggests that the "drowning man" is smith herself, she also states that there are problems with reading the poem as a cry for help due to the humorous tone of the poem yet at the same time she also notes that the representational form of the poem "may easily be misread as a friendly wave of the hand". the poem's simple diction led clive james to suggest that smith attempted to write the poem so that the diction appeared ignorant of poetic convention yet 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."