“I rather like the idea of death.” — poet Stevie Smith

Born on this day in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire England, Stevie Smith was christened Florence Margaret, but was called “Stevie” by her friends. (She was a very petite woman: “Stevie” was the name of a famous jockey of the time.)

Her first poems were published in 1935. She was advised to write a novel, which she did. She wrote a couple of novels, all autobiographical. Her poetry took some time to gain the reputation it enjoys today. Smith is what I call a “sucker-punch” poet. She leads you by the hand through the poem, lulling you into relaxation with sing-song-y rhymes, and then rips the rug out from under you. Socks you in the gut.

More on Stevie Smith after the jump:

 
 
Her most famous poem is “Not waving but drowning”. I read it for the first time in high school and it absolutely haunted me. I wasn’t haunted by his death, I was haunted by his gestures being misunderstood so totally. That was the worst.

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.

Stevie Smith illustrated her poems with little caricatures, sketches, “cartoons”. In the 50s, she had a big battle with a publisher over whether or not to include her drawings alongside the poems. The drawings make the poems seem funnier and lighter than they are. They create the illusion that Smith’s poems are a grown-up version of Mother Goose. Perhaps this was Smith’s point. She understood the sucker-punch.

Stevie Smith was an isolated person. When asked what other poetry she read, she answered, “Why nobody’s but my own.” (This reminds me of James Joyce’s response to the question “Who is the greatest living author who writes in English?”: “Well, aside from myself, I don’t know.”) Her family moved to a house in the north London suburb when she was three, and she lived there for the rest of her life with her aunt and her sister. She did not pal around with other poets. She did not identify herself with any poetic movement, or “school”. This was one of the reasons her stuff was either ignored or not taken seriously. She wasn’t part of the “clique.”

She used nursery rhyme rhythms, and yet her work is full of dread. She said she lived in an “age of unrest”. She cloaked her rage in sing-song, but make no mistake: she was totally direct. She despised God, and addressed him face to face many times. Her anger is titanic, expressed in rhythms like taunts on a playground. The juxtaposition produced amazing effects.

Her life was turned into a play by playwright Hugh Whitemore, adapted into a film, starring Glenda Jackson.

The following poem takes as its jumping-off point the famous story told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about a mythical “man from Porlock” interrupting Coleridge’s writing of “Kubla Khan”. Coleridge was asleep, and the poem came to him in a dream. He woke up, excited, and began to write it down. Then a knock came at the door. Coleridge writes:

On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

“Kubla Khan” remained unfinished and the “man from Porlock” will forever be known as a metaphor for all the things interrupting the flow of inspiration. Damn that man from Porlock. Every writer knows him well.

I love Smith’s clarity and humor in this poem, her willingness to blame Coleridge for opening the door in the first place, but also, her humanistic response: “Often we all do wrong.”

Thoughts about the Person from Porlock

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.

*

May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn’t you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go,

He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,

And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.

I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,

Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

*

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.

*

Why do they grumble so much?
He comes like a benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.

*

These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

QUOTES:

Clive James, The New Yorker, September 28, 1987:

Stevie Smith is a rare bird, a Maltese falcon.

Poetry contributor David Wright:

… one of the most original women poets now writing, [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no ‘school’ -”whether real or invented as they usually are -”but her work is so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Whereas Emily Dickinson describes death as a ceremoniously mannered gentleman and Sylvia Plath, in some poems, ecstatically hurtles toward oblivion, Smith calmly welcomes death as tame, sweet, and gentle, even resulting in a possible improvement of character.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets writes:

Her verse is haunted by tributary rhythms which she incorporates into her various characters and voices. There is a formal residue of rhyme and runs of meter, but her anarchic approach will not allow her to follow a form through. There are fairy tales and actual stories seen from fairy-tale perspectives, and echoes of Poe, the Coleridge of “Christabel”, “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Longfellow, the Tennyson of the Idylls and “The Lady of Shalott”, Blake, Cowper, the hymn writers and many others sound. So do popular tunes like “Greensleeves,” which provides the backing for a poem. It is a world of troubled innocence. Mother Goose, Alice, and also Struwelpeter. The way in which popular and deliberate echoes play through the poetry is unique.

Clive James, The New Yorker, September 28, 1987:

Her poems, if they were pills to purge melancholy, did not work for her. The best of them, however, work like charms for everyone else…She strove industriously to make it look as if she didn’t quite know what she was doing. She knew exactly. Her poetry has the vivid appeal of the Douanier Rousseau’s pictures or Mussorgsky’s music, but where they lacked schooling she only pretended to lack it. Closer analogies would be with Picasso painting clowns or Stravinsky writing ballets. She knew everything about how poetry had sounded in the past, and could assemble echoes with the assurance of any other modern artist.

Michael Schmidt again:

Given the preponderance of Victorian and Edwardian models, a diction ruefully littered with “Oh” and “Alas”, the painful rhymes, the doggerel, how does she evade banality? Not through irony but through a wit and tone that wrest sense from cliche and near nonsense. Her humor revives an outworn language. She makes a patchwork quilt of old rags of verse. It is not exactly new but it is bright, wise and silly.

Clive James, The New Yorker, September 28, 1987:

Even in her work, she can be so fey that the skin crawls. But when she is in form she can deconstruct literature in the only way that counts–by constructing something that feels as if it had just flown together, except you can’t take it apart…Some would say that Stevie Smith was as daft as a brush. Others would say that she was pretty much of a bitch. Calling her mad was always the best way to get out of admitting that she could be cruel, just as calling her naive was always the best way to get out of admitting that her poetry made almost everybody else’s sound overwrought.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Her mock naivete, akin to the cunning innocence of the fool or the trickster, can be seen partly as a woman’s response to the world of modern English poetry, a way of coping with, deflecting, and subverting its masculine norms.

Stevie Smith, on whether or not her attitudes changed during her life:

No, they haven’t changed at all, I think. One has one’s thoughts about things and one takes great pleasure in these thoughts and in working them out. But I should be very surprised, for instance, if one day I said, ‘This is absolutely black’ and the next day I said, ‘This is absolutely white.’

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3 Responses to “I rather like the idea of death.” — poet Stevie Smith

  1. Michael says:

    Thanks for this and for your other poetry posts. My wife is a big Stevie Smith fan and I’ve read her work widely but not too deeply. Perhaps I should change that. I must have read Not Waving But Drowning dozens of times and before every reading I have forgotten how bleak it is. People who dismiss her as a mere Cat Poetess are missing a unique voice. I hadn’t read Person From Porlock but after staying up too late too many times worrying about phrasing and sentences and semi-colons on so many writing projects, I now know I too was longing for someone to bring my thoughts to an end. And in a happy coincidence, a day or two before I read this post I was listening to an album by David Bowie’s former guitarist Mick Ronson. The title? Heaven and Hull. I wonder if everyone from Hull has the same mordant wit or is it just the ones who got out?

    • sheila says:

      Thanks for reading and commenting, Michael!

      // before every reading I have forgotten how bleak it is //

      I have the exact same experience.

      Heaven and Hull – wow. Love these dovetails.

  2. John Dickerson says:

    The Person from Porlock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_from_Porlock is intriguing, but likely to be fanciful.

    At any rate, no one has ever dealt with subject so well as has Stevie. She was remarkable!

    Here is more about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Smith

    Thank you so much Sheila for writing this sort of article. I forward them on to my family for their elucidation.

    John

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