PENGUIN BOOKS
Selected Poems
Stevie Smith was born in Hull. When she was three she went with her mother and sister to live with her aunt in a house in Palmers Green, London, where she was to stay for the rest of her life. She attended the North London Collegiate School for Girls and her first and only job was with Newnes-Pearson, the magazine publishers, where she became private secretary to Sir George Newnes and Sir Neville Pearson. She submitted her first volume of poems to Jonathan Cape when she was thirty-two, but was asked to write a novel instead. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936, and was followed the next year by a volume of poetry, A Good Time was Had by All; both books were immediately recognized as being the product of a unique talent. She wrote only two more novels, Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949), but had a further eight collections of poems published, her reputation reaching its peak in the 1950s. She also made several very effective recordings and broadcasts of her poetry, reading and singing to her own music, largely based on Gregorian chant and hymn tunes.
Stevie Smith died in 1971 at the age of sixty-eight. In 1975 her Collected Poems were published and in 1977 Hugh Whitemore wrote Stevie, a stage play based on her life and writings.
Edited with a Preface
by James MacGibbon
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published as The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Allen Lane 1975
This selection published in Penguin Books 1978
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2002
1
The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith copyright © Stevie Smith 1937
1938, 1942, 1950, 1957, 1962, 1966, 1971, 1972
This selection copyright © James MacGibbon, 1975, 1978
All rights reserved
Requests for permission to reprint should be sent to
James MacGibbon, The Cellars, Landscove, Ashburton, Devon TQ13 7LY
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
To
Glenda Jackson and Hugh Whitemore
who achieved what seemed impossible –
the dramatic portrayal of
Stevie Smith
PREFACE
The Hound of Ulster
On the Death of a German Philosopher
Papa Love Baby
Bandol (Var)
Egocentric
Alfred the Great
Mrs Simpkins
How far can you Press a Poet?
To the Tune of the Coventry Carol
The Suburban Classes
Spanish School
Night-Time in the Cemetery
Alone in the Woods
God and the Devil
Es war einmal
Numbers
From the County Lunatic Asylum
The Bereaved Swan
Correspondence between Mr Harrison in Newcastle and Mr Sholto Peach Harrison in Hull
Nature and Free Animals
Eng.
Death Bereaves our Common Mother Nature Grieves for my Dead Brother
Bag-Snatching in Dublin
The River Deben
Death Came to Me
No Respect
The Reason
I Like to Play with Him
Analysand
Sunt Leones
Lord Mope
Never Again
Little Boy Lost
Angel of Grace
Freddy
Is it Wise?
This Englishwoman
Lord Barrenstock
Maximilian Esterhazy
Major Macroo
Private Means is Dead
Bereavement
Death of Mr Mounsel
Who Killed Lawless Lean?
Road Up
Mrs Osmosis
The Fugitive’s Ride
Suburb
Beware the Man
Breughel
Tender Only to One
O Happy Dogs of England
Darling Daughters
The Bishops of the Church of England
Eulenspiegelei
The Abominable Lake
One of Many
Death’s Ostracism
The Boat
Parrot
The Doctor
I Hate this Girl
Infelice
Come, Death (I)
Silence and Tears
A Father for a Fool
Brickenden, Hertfordshire
The Murderer
Mother, among the Dustbins
Le Désert de l’Amour
To a Dead Vole
Reversionary
Dear Karl
In Canaan’s Happy Land
Proud Death with Swelling Port
My Soul
Dear Female Heart
How Slowly Time Lengthens
The River Humber
La Gretchen de Nos Jours (I)
Nourish Me on an Egg
Souvenir de Monsieur Poop
Unser Vater
Gnädiges Fräulein
The Friend
The Lads of the Village
The Photograph
‘… and the clouds return after the rain’
Out of Time
The Children of the Cross
Fallen, Fallen
Will Ever?
Little Boy Sick
The Violent Hand
Human Affection
A King in Funeral Procession
Murder
Girls!
Where are you going?
Autumn
Poet!
The Zoo
Advice to Young Children
The Face
If I lie down
Conviction (i)
Conviction (ii)
Conviction (iii)
Conviction (iv)
The Virtuoso
Villains
Le Majeur Ydow
The Little Daughters of America
She said…
Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime, il faut aimer ce que l’on a –
The Conventionalist
Study to Deserve Death
Dirge
Distractions and the Human Crowd
Be off!
Love Me!
The Wild Dog
Lady ‘Rogue’ Singleton
Rencontres Funestes
The Film Star
The Bottle of Aspirins
The Governess
The Actress
The Devil-my-Wife
The Repentance of Lady T
The Smile
Forgot!
A Man I Am
The White Thought
In the Night
The Magic Morning
Après la Politique, la Haine des Bourbons
The Poets are Silent
The Pleasures of Friendship
Happiness
Lot’s Wife
The Fool
No More People
Hast Du Dich Verirrt?
Satin-Clad
Unpopular, lonely and loving
‘Ceci est digne de gens sans Dieu’
When the Sparrow Flies
Voices against England in the Night
‘N’est-ce pas assez de ne me point haïr?’
The Failed Spirit
The Sliding Mountain
The Recluse
‘I could let Tom go – but what about the children?’
Christmas
Torquemada
The Roman Road
The Castle
To Dean Inge Lecturing on Origen
Behind the Knight
Harold’s Leap
A Mother’s Hearse
Touch and Go
Man is a Spirit
Thought is Superior
The River God
Cool as a Cucumber
The Orphan Reformed
A Shooting Incident
‘Oh stubborn race of Cadmus’ seed…’
The Ambassador
Persephone
Do Take Muriel Out
The Weak Monk
Le Singe Qui Swing
The Broken Friendship
The After-thought
The Wanderer
No Categories!
The Deserter
I rode with my darling…
God and Man
Mr Over
My Cats
Drugs Made Pauline Vague
Our Bog is Dood
Wretched Woman
Lightly Bound
Le Revenant
To School!
To an American Publisher
The Rehearsal
Death-bed of a Financier
The Hat
The Ride
I Am
The Crown of Bays
A Jew is Angry with his Friend who does not Believe in Circumcision
From the Coptic
A Humane Materialist at the Burning of a Heretic
In Protocreation
Do Not!
The Death Sentence
The Commuted Sentence
The Celtic Fringe
The Leader
Oh, If Only…
Who Shot Eugenie?
Full Well I Know
Voices about the Princess Anemone
Deeply Morbid
The Ghost of Ware
Not Waving but Drowning
The English Visitor
‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’
The Fairy Bell
The New Age
The Blue from Heaven
The Lady of the Well-Spring
The Queen and the Young Princess
A Dream of Comparison
My Hat
The Engine Drain
Saint Anthony and the Rose of Life
Anger’s Freeing Power
Fafnir and the Knights
Songe d’Athalie
The Hostage
Away, Melancholy
Dido’s Farewell to Aeneas
Childe Rolandine
The Jungle Husband
‘Come on, Come back’
Why are the Clergy…?
I Remember
But Murderous
This is Disgraceful and Abominable
God the Eater
God the Drinker
Will Man Ever Face Fact and not Feel Flat?
Every Lovely Limb’s a Desolation
A Dream of Nourishment
The Airy Christ
It Filled my Heart with Love
I. An Agnostic
II. A Religious Man
Dear Little Sirmio
‘Great Unaffected Vampires and the Moon’
The Celts
The Passing Cloud
Loin de l’Être
My Cat Major
Parents
To a Lady in a Train
Adelaide Abner
The English
King Hamlet’s Ghost
At School
Can it Be?
The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton
The Past
The Singing Cat
Longing for Death because of Feebleness
My Heart Goes Out
Look!
Who is this Who Howls and Mutters?
Magna est Veritas
The Light of Life
In the Park
Evangelie or The Figure of Literary Corruption, seeking Glory not Truth
Jumbo
The Choosers
The Occasional Yarrow
The Sorrowful Girl
The Starling
Die Lorelei
Farewell
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
The Frog Prince
A House of Mercy
Avondale
Scorpion
Seymour and Chantelle or Un peu de vice
How do you see?
The Ass
A Soldier Dear to Us
The Forlorn Sea
Angel Boley
The Donkey
Cock-a-Doo
Francesca in Winter
So to fatness come
The Sallow Bird
The Word
Nor We of Her to Him
Mrs Blow and Her Animals
Oh grateful colours, bright looks!
O Pug!
Archie and Tina
The Poet Hin
The House of Over-Dew
The Galloping Cat
Hippy-Mo
Hendecasyllables
Black March
Grave by a Holm-Oak
The Sea-widow
The Stroke
Come, Death (II)
INDEX OF TITLES
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
STEVIE SMITH’S first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936 when she was thirty-three. She had submitted a volume of poetry to Cape, the publishers, but they asked her to write a novel first and the poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All, followed the next year. Both were recognized for the original works they are, and her reputation grew slowly but steadily, rising to its peak at the time of her death at sixty-eight in 1971.
She was born in Hull, Yorkshire, and when she was three came with her mother and sister to live with her aunt in Palmers Green, London, eventually going to the North London Collegiate School for Girls, one of the late Victorian educational establishments that pioneered the idea that girls deserved as good a schooling as boys. She did not go to university and became a secretary in the magazine publishing company, Newnes, Pearson, where she continued to work until the early fifties, latterly as private secretary to Sir George Newnes and Sir Neville Pearson. She gave out that her work was never heavy. However, she did pick up good advice about investments and her estate showed that the advice must have been good, for her writing could not have made a major contribution to the reasonable sum she left.
She certainly seemed to have time to spare in her ‘private office’ to entertain her friends to tea and hot-buttered toast with strawberry jam – and conversation. I think her job amused her as the opening lines of Novel on Yellow Paper suggest: ‘Beginning this book (not as they say “book” in our trade – they mean magazine)…’
During all this period and until some ten years before her death, she lived with ‘Aunt’ (alone during all her maturity) and she ran the small house, a place of fascinatingly ugly décor, not a stick of which, as far as could be observed, had ever been changed since Stevie’s arrival, down to the aged gas cooker and a calendar with an Art Nouveau design that had only its date pad changed year after year. When her aunt became more or less bed-ridden, she gave up her office job to look after her – a duty she performed gladly. Her aunt, sometimes referred to as ‘the Lion’, was from the earliest days an important factor in Stevie’s life. She was a sterling, capable character who supported Stevie and her elder sister, Molly, in every way and this was necessary, for their mother was not robust in health and their father often away. Stevie’s health was never particularly good and from the age of five she spent the best part of three years in a home for tubercular children at Broad-stairs. ‘Aunt’ is commemorated in her first novel: ‘Darling Auntie Lion, I do so hope you will forgive what is written here. You are yourself like shining gold.’
Palmers Green was inconveniently placed in North London from the less unfashionable localities where her multitudes of friends lived and party-going was important but, somehow, she always got to them, either arranging for friends to drive her home or staying the night with her hostess. In this small way she was perhaps demanding but always rewarding – amused, amusing and deliciously barbed in her comments on people and events. She would arrive sometimes looking half-dead, hardly able to talk, yet within the time it took her to drink a glass of wine an astonishing transformation took place: she ‘came alive’ and would converse unflaggingly during the entire evening, the quality of her talk elusive as quicksilver and ranging from metaphysical speculation, through gossip, to raucous humour. Her will to live, this power of resurrection – not too strong a term though it would have touched off one of her wildest fantasies – was never more evident than on these occasions, and before going to her public engagements which she continued to keep till her illness was far advanced. Her description of her private audience with the Queen before the presentation of the 1969 Queen’s Medal for Poetry may rank as one of her most vivid, wittiest stories; but one may be sure that her behaviour was highly and consciously professional, the more so for its spontaneity.
She was small-boned and frail-looking and dressed with some care in a style of her own which had, at first sight, and specially when she aged, a ‘little girl’ look; but one soon saw that it was perfectly appropriate and never without dignity. With her dark, straight, page-boy hair and dark eyes set in a pale, mobile face, she could have an almost sprite-like appearance. But in repose, and particularly in profile, her fine-boned features were of a striking beauty that was never more apparent than when death approached.
Novel on Yellow Paper and her third and last novel, The Holiday, reveal much of her character, apart from her religious beliefs. I am not qualified to define them but her life-long attachment to the Church of England, in belief and unbelief, is evident in her poetry, as it was in her conversation, even when she spoke or wrote vehemently against it and professed herself an unbeliever. An old friend, the Reverend Gerard Irvine has this to say:
In religion Stevie was ambivalent: neither a believer, an unbeliever nor agnostic, but oddly all three at once. Intellectually she rejected the dogmas of her high Anglican background, as unreasonable and morally inferior. But she had an obsessive concern with them. She demanded a maximizing faith to reject; she was scornful of what she considered watered-down reformulations of the faith, and disgusted by their liturgical expression. One could say that she did not like the God of Christian orthodoxy, but she could not disregard Him or ever quite bring herself to disbelieve in Him.
She did not believe, however, that suicide was necessarily wrong’ and often discussed the possibility for herself, should life, mentally or physically, become intolerable. Indeed, death probably held less fear for her than most: she had come to terms with it as her ‘gentle friend’, in the manner of the metaphysical poets. Her last poem, Come Death (the second of that title), was written after she became fatally ill and, although she had lost her power of speech some weeks before her blessedly unprotracted death from brain tumour, she made it clear she did not wish her life to be prolonged, handing me the typescript of that poem with the word ‘death’ encircled.
What I am sure gave her particular pleasure in the last decade of her life was the increasing demands made on her to give poetry readings, not just to societies but in schools. She had been acclaimed by the generation before her (the doyen of the London literary critics, Desmond MacCarthy, wrote ‘she has a little nugget of genius’), by her contemporaries of course, and latterly, and more so than ever, by the new generation.
This new collection of Stevie Smith’s poems has been selected from her complete poems, published in 1975. The choice is inevitably a subjective, even an arbitrary one, but my broad guidelines were to omit poems that were somewhat repetitive or unoriginal (in terms of a poet who was notably original) and the occasional trivia. It was an invidious task that was only undertaken to keep the length of the book within economic limits and in the knowledge that all her work is preserved in the collected poems. Inevitably many poems of merit and interest have had to be omitted from this edition, but perhaps it will direct readers to the complete collection.
Since 1977 her work has become familiar to many thousands, who might otherwise have missed it, through the success of Hugh Whitemore’s play, Stevie, in which Glenda Jackson acted and spoke the poetry so brilliantly.
James MacGibbon
Note to the 1985 edition: Mr Peter Dickinson devised ‘Stevie Smith: A Portrait in Words and Music’, which filled the Purcell Room at the Festival Hall in London in March 1985. Stevie Smith poems set to music by Elizabeth Lutyens, Gordon Crosse and Peter Dickinson were sung by Miss Meriel Dickinson, accompanied by Peter Dickinson, and Miss Betty Mulcahy recited others brilliantly. It was a finely integrated ‘portrait’, a memorable tribute, which illustrated the many aspects of Stevie Smith for an enthusiastic audience.
Little boy
Will you stop
And take a look
In the puppy shop –
Dogs blue and liver
Noses aquiver
Little dogs big dogs
Dogs for sport and pleasure
Fat dogs meagre dogs
Dogs for lap and leisure.
Do you see that wire-haired terrier?
Could anything be merrier?
Do you see that Labrador retriever?
His name is Belvoir.
Thank you courteous stranger, said the child,
By your words I am beguiled,
But tell me I pray
What lurks in the gray
Cold shadows at the back of the shop?
Little boy do not stop
Come away
From the puppy shop.
For the Hound of Ulster lies tethered there
Cuchulain tethered by his golden hair
His eyes are closed and his lips are pale
Hurry little boy he is not for sale.
He wrote The I and the It
He wrote The It and the Me
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.
My mother was a romantic girl
So she had to marry a man with his hair in curl
Who subsequently became my unrespected papa,
But that was a long time ago now.
What folly it is that daughters are always supposed to be
In love with papa. It wasn’t the case with me
I couldn’t take to him at all
But he took to me
What a sad fate to befall
A child of three.
I sat upright in my baby carriage
And wished mama hadn’t made such a foolish marriage.
I tried to hide it, but it showed in my eyes unfortunately
And a fortnight later papa ran away to sea.
He used to come home on leave
It was always the same
I could not grieve
But I think I was somewhat to blame.
Bandol (Var)
In the south of France, my dear,
Is full of most awfully queer
Majors of the British Army, retired.
They live in boats tied up to the quay
(No income tax, no port dues here you see).
And they’re always trying to buy or to sell each other things
And they hope what they lose on the roundabouts they’ll
make on the swings.
And they say
Quite in the best stage-army traditional way:
‘England was quite a good place to live in before the War
Hawkahaw.’
They all seem to have got catarrh.
Bandol (Var)
How picturesque you are.
What care I if good God be
If he be not good to me,
If he will not hear my cry
Nor heed my melancholy midnight sigh?
What care I if he created Lamb,
And golden Lion, and mud-delighting Clam,
And Tiger stepping out on padded toe,
And the fecund earth the Blindworms know?
He made the Sun, the Moon and every Star,
He made the infant Owl and the Baboon,
He made the ruby-orbed Pelican,
He made all silent inhumanity,
Nescient and quiescent to his will,
Unquickened by the questing conscious flame
That is my glory and my bitter bane.
What care I if Skies are blue,
If God created Gnat and Gnu,
What care I if good God be
If he be not good to me?
Honour and magnify this man of men
Who keeps a wife and seven children on £210
Paid weekly in an envelope
And yet he never has abandoned hope.
Mrs Simpkins never had very much to do
So it occurred to her one day that the Trinity wasn’t true
Or at least but a garbled version of the truth
And that things had moved very far since the days of her youth.
So she became a spiritualist and at her very first party
Just to give her a feeling of confidence the spirit spoke up hearty:
‘Since I crossed over dear friends’ it said ‘I’m no different to what
I was before
Death’s not a separation or alteration or parting it’s just a
one-handled door
We spirits can come back to you if your seance is orthodox
But you can’t come over to us till your body’s shut in a box
And this is the great thought I want to leave with you today
You’ve heard it before but in case you forgot death isn’t a passing
away
It’s just a carrying on with friends relations and brightness
Only you don’t have to bother with sickness and there’s no
financial tightness.’
Mrs Simpkins went home and told her husband he was a weak
pated fellow
And when he heard the news he turned a daffodil shade of yellow
‘What do you mean, Maria?’ he cried, ‘it can’t be true there’s no
rest
From one’s uncles and brothers and sisters nor even the wife of
one’s breast?’
‘It’s the truth,’ Mrs Simpkins affirmed, ‘there is no separation
There’s a great reunion coming for which this life’s but a
preparation.’
This worked him to such a pitch that he shot himself through the
head
And now she has to polish the floors of Westminster County Hall
for her daily bread.
How far can you press a poet?
To the last limit and he’ll not show it
And one step further and he’s dead
And his death is upon your head.
The nearly right
And yet not quite
In love is wholly evil
And every heart
That loves in part
Is mortgaged to the devil.
I loved or thought
I loved in sort
Was this to love akin
To take the best
And leave the rest
And let the devil in?
O lovers true
And others too
Whose best is only better
Take my advice
Shun compromise
Forget him and forget her.
There is far too much of the suburban classes
Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses.
Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie
Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye.
Now I have a plan which I will enfold
(There’s this to be said for them, they do as they’re told)
Then tell them their country’s in mortal peril
They believed it before and again will not cavil
Put it in caption form firm and slick
If they see it in print it is bound to stick:
‘Your King and your Country need you Dead’
You see the idea? Well, let it spread.
Have a suitable drug under string and label
Free for every Registered Reader’s table.
For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic
I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic:
Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won’t hurt
And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.
The painters of Spain
Dipped their brushes in pain
By grief on a gallipot
Was Spanish tint begot.
Just see how Theotocopoulos
Throws on his canvas
Colours of hell
Christ lifts his head to cry
Once more I bleed and die
Mary emaciated cries:
Are men not satiated?
Must the blood of my son
For ever run?
The sky turns to burning oil
Blood red and yellow boil
Down from on high
Will no hills fall on us
To hide that sky?
Y Luciente’s pen
Traces the life of men
Christs crucified upon a slope
They have no hope
Like Calderon who wrote in grief and scorn:
The greatest crime of man’s to have been born.
Dr Péral
In a coat of gray
Has a way
With his mouth which seems to say
A lot
But nothing very good to hear
And as for Doña Ysabel Corbos de Porcel
Well
What a bitch
This seems to me a portrait which
Might have been left unhung
Or at anyrate slung
A little higher up.
But never mind there’s always Ribera
With his little lamb
(Number two-four-four)
To give a more
Genial atmosphere
And a little jam
For the pill –
But still.
The funeral paths are hung with snow
About the graves the mourners go
To think of those who lie below.
The churchyard pales are black against the night
And snow hung here seems doubly white.
I have a horror of this place
A horror of each moonlit mourner’s face
These people are not familiar
But strange and stranger than strange peculiar
They have that look of a cheese do you know sour-sweet
You can smell their feet.
Yet must I tread
About my dead
And guess the forms within the grave
And hear the clank of jowl on jowl
Where low lie kin no love could save.
Yet stand I by my grave as they by theirs. Oh bitter Death
That brought their love and mine unto a coffin’s breadth.
Alone in the woods I felt
The bitter hostility of the sky and the trees
Nature has taught her creatures to hate
Man that fusses and fumes
Unquiet man
As the sap rises in the trees
As the sap paints the trees a violent green
So rises the wrath of Nature’s creatures
At man
So paints the face of Nature a violent green.
Nature is sick at man
Sick at his fuss and fume
Sick at his agonies
Sick at his gaudy mind
That drives his body
Ever more quickly
More and more
In the wrong direction.
God and the Devil
Were talking one day
Ages and ages of years ago.
God said: Suppose
Things were fashioned this way,
Well then, so and so.
The Devil said: No,
Prove it if you can.
So God created Man
And that is how it all began.
It has continued now for many a year
And sometimes it seems more than we can bear.
But why should bowels yearn and cheeks grow pale?
We’re here to point a moral and adorn a tale.
I raised my gun
I took the sight
Against the sun
I shot a kite.
I raised my gun
I took the sight
A second one
I shot in flight.
I raised my gun
I shot a plover
I loaded up
And shot another.
Now round about me
Lay the dead
One more, one more,
Then home to bed.
Pray Heaven, said I
Send the best
That ever took
Lead to its breast.
Upon the word
Upon the right
Rose up a phoenix
Beaming bright.