Swimming Degna Stone

Degna Stone · Leaving Cert Poetry

Two people wade further into a river than either of them means to, and the poem uses that near-drowning to talk about a relationship both of them already know is dangerous.

Swimming: Context

No verified biographical or publication background is available for this poem, so this page is grounded on the text alone. What the poem gives you is enough: two people, referred to throughout only as a shared we, go swimming somewhere remote enough that nobody would notice if it went wrong. The poem is short, eight stanzas, mostly tercets, with a third or fourth line often dropped and indented at the end of a stanza, so the form itself keeps losing a line to white space, echoing the poem’s own subject. Two stanzas split even further, a couplet followed by a single indented line standing almost on its own, so the poem’s shape keeps thinning out exactly as the danger grows. The title, Swimming, is quietly ironic: the poem is really about not knowing when to stop, and the plain, ordinary word in the title undersells what actually happens by design.

Key Moments

The poem opens with the couple already aware of the truth about themselves, before any action has even happened.

“were not what we wanted, / we strayed”Swimming

They move together into real danger, each pulling the other further in rather than one person leading.

“The water stripped our skin / nerve ends shut down”Swimming

The poem never states outright that anyone nearly drowned. It ends instead on a single, flat word that offers shock rather than relief.

“we were dazed.”Swimming

Key Themes

The central theme is complicity: every verb of pulling and straying is shared between the couple, so no single person carries the blame for how far things go. A second theme is risk inside a relationship both people already understand, since the opening lines admit the truth before the danger even begins. A third is numbness, the strange paradox of feeling stripped bare in the very line that follows the nerves shutting down, feeling everything and nothing at once. A fourth theme is isolation, made literal by the choice to swim somewhere remote enough that no one nearby would notice or intervene, which turns a private choice into something closer to a shared risk neither person stops.

Literary Devices

Stone uses water as an extended metaphor for a relationship that has gone further than either person meant it to. The poem’s short lines and frequent white space, especially the dropped, indented final lines, physically enact the loss of solid footing the poem describes. Diction shifts from ordinary to clinical at the poem’s most dangerous moment, “nerve ends shut down” reading more like a medical note than a description of romance, which strips any softness from the scene right when the danger is highest. The poem also withholds its rescuers: whoever pulls the couple out is never identified, which keeps the poem’s attention fixed on what the couple felt rather than on who saved them, and refuses the reader the comfort of a named hero.

Mood

The mood begins confessional and matter-of-fact, tightens into physical danger and sensory shock through the middle stanzas, and drops into a suspended, watchful stillness at the near-drowning itself. There is a brief, almost eerie calm in the stanza where the speaker watches the empty space where the other person should be, panic held just below the surface of very plain language. The poem closes flat and stunned rather than relieved, refusing to tell the reader what, if anything, the couple learned from how far they let things go.

Conclusion

This short poem uses a near-drowning to talk about a relationship neither person can quite stop, without ever naming the relationship directly. Its understatement is the whole method: a plain title, plain diction, and a refusal to state outright what nearly happened all make the danger feel more real than a more dramatic telling would. Reading it as purely about water misses the point. Reading it as entirely about the relationship, with the river as backdrop, gets much closer to what the poem is actually doing. For Ordinary Level, hold onto the shared, plural voice that runs through every stanza, the shift from admission to danger to numbness, and the refusal to resolve into relief at the end.

Quick Links

More Ordinary Level 2027 poems and notes