All the Poems

by Stevie Smith

Paid weekly in an envelope

  And yet he never has abandoned hope.

  Heber

  I love little Heber

  His coat is so warm

  And if I don’t speak to him

  He’ll do me no harm

  But sit by my window

  And stare in the street

  And pull up a hassock for the comfort of his feet.

  I love little Heber

  His eyes are so wide

  And if I don’t speak to him

  He’ll stay by my side.

  But oh in this silence

  I find but suspense:

  I must speak have spoken have driven him hence.

  Mrs Simpkins

  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 alternation 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?

  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.

  Forgive me, forgive me

  Forgive me forgive me my heart is my own

  And not to be given for any man’s frown

  Yet would I not keep it for ever alone.

  Forgive me forgive me I thought that I loved

  My fancy betrayed me my heart was unmoved

  My fancy too often has carelessly roved.

  Forgive me forgive me for here where I stand

  There is no friend beside me no lover at hand

  No footstep but mine in my desert of sand.

  Progression

  I fell in love with Major Spruce

  And never gave a sign

  The sweetest major in the force

  And only 39.

  It is Major Spruce

  And he’s grown such a bore, such a bore,

  I used to think I was in love with him

  Well, I don’t think so any more.

  It was the Major Spruce.

  He died. Didn’t I tell you?

  He was the last of the Spruces,

  And about time too.

  To the Tune of the Coventry Carol

  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.

  The Suburban Classes

  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.

  Spanish School

  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.

  Night-Time in the Cemetery

  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 form within the grave,

  And hear the clank of jowl on jowl

  Where
low lies 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.

  The Songster

  Miss Pauncefort sang at the top of her voice

  (Sing tirry-lirry-lirry down the lane)

  And nobody knew what she sang about

  (Sing tirry-lirry-lirry all the same).

  Up and Down

  Up and down the streets they go

  Tapping tapping to and fro

  What they see I do not know

  Up and down the streets they hurry

  Push and rush and jerk and worry

  Full of ineffectual flurry

  Up and down the streets they run

  From morning to the set of sun

  I shall be glad when they have done

  I shall be glad when there’s an end

  Of all the noise that doth offend

  My soul. Night, don cloak, descend.

  From the Greek

  To many men strange fates are given

  Beyond remission or recall

  But the worst fate of all (tra la)

  ’s to have no fate at all (tra la).

  Alone in the Woods

  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.

  Intimation of Immortality

  Never for ever, for ever never, oh

  Say not aeonial I must for ever go

  Sib to eternity, to confraternity

  Of Time’s commensurate multiples a foe.

  Infant

  It was a cynical babe

  Lay in its mother’s arms

  Born two months too soon

  After many alarms

  Why is its mother sad

  Weeping without a friend

  Where is its father – say?

  He tarries in Ostend.

  It was a cynical babe. Reader before you condemn, pause,

  It was a cynical babe. Not without cause.

  God and the Devil

  God and the Devil

  Were talking one day

  Ages and ages of years ago.

  God said: Suppose

  Things were fashioned in 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.

  Es war einmal

  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.

  I raised my gun

  I took the sight

  My lead unbarred

  That breast of white.

  Alas for awful

  Magic art

  The bullet bounced

  Into my heart.

  The phoenix bled

  My heart can not

  But heavy sits

  Neath leaden shot.

  Leave shooting, friend,

  Or if you must

  Shoot only what

  Is mortal dust.

  Pray not to Heaven

  He stock your bag

  Or you may feel

  Your vitals sag.

  Pray not to Heaven

  For heavenly bird

  Or Heaven may take you

  At your word.

  Dream

  I came upon it in a dream

  It was a sad and mournful scene

  A mournfuller could not have been.

  I rode my steed upon a plain

  Against a bitter driving rain

  So may I never ride again.

  No man was there I rode alone

  The icy wind cut to the bone

  I came upon a funeral stone.

  Deep in a yew tree grove it stood

  And on its side were marks of blood

  And at its foot the yellow mud.

  I left the saddle, left my steed,

  I went down on my hands to read

  The tombstone’s closely written screed, –

  But oh from left and oh from right

  Rang out a voice of ghostly might:

  ‘Leave, lady, leave thy Leda light!’

  The rain fell down with a heavy stroke,

  I mounted up, my heart was broke.

  I turned about and I awoke.

  Numbers

  A thousand and fifty-one waves

  Two hundred and thirty-one seagulls

  A cliff of four hundred feet

  Three miles of ploughed fields

  One house

  Four windows look on the waves

  Four windows look on the ploughed fields

  One skylight looks on the sky

  In that skylight’s sky is one seagull.

  From the County Lunatic Asylum

  The people say that spiritism is a joke and a swizz,

  The Church that it is dangerous – not half it is.

  Barlow

  I’m growing much fonder of Barlow

  And I think of him a lot

  And something I think I’m in love with him

  And wish I was not.

  For Barlow’s my sister’s fancy

  The son of the Bishop of Bye

  And if he should plump for the younger

  That’s me, the elder would die.

  Oh I see by each curve and each wrinkle

  Of each delicate lid of each eye

  If Barlow should plump for the younger

  The elder would certainly die.

  Lament of a Slug-a-bed’s Wife

  Get up thou lazy lump thou log get up

  For it is very nearly time to sup

  And did the Saviour die that thou should’st be

  In bed for breakfast, dinner lunch and tea?

  The Bereaved Swan

  Wan

  Swan

  On the lake

  Like a cake

  Of soap

  Why is the swan

  Wan

  On the lake?

  He has abandoned hope.

  Wan

  Swan

  On the lake afloat

  Bows his head:

  O would that I were dead

  For her sake that lies

  Wrapped from my eyes

  In a mantle of death,

  The swan saith.

  Correspondence between Mr Harrison in Newcastle and Mr Sholto Peach Harrison in Hull

  Sholto Peach Harrison you are no son of mine


  And do you think I bred you up to cross the River Tyne

  And do you think I bred you up (and mother says the same)

  And do you think I bred you up to live a life of shame

  To live a life of shame my boy as you are thinking to

  Down south in Kingston-upon-Hull a traveller in glue?

  Come back my bonny boy nor break your father’s heart

  Come back and marry Lady Susan Smart

  She has a mint in Anglo-Persian oil

  And Sholto never more need think of toil.

  You are an old and evil man my father

  I tell you frankly Sholto had much rather

  Travel in glue unrecompensed unwed

  Than go to church with oily Sue and afterwards to bed.

  Nature and Free Animals

  I will forgive you everything.

  But what you have done to my Dogs

  I will not forgive.

  You have taught them the sicknesses of your mind

  And the sicknesses of your body

  You have taught them to be servile

  To hang servilely upon your countenance

  To be dependent touching and entertaining

  To have rights to be wronged

  And wrongs to be righted.

  You have taught them to be protected by a Society.

  This I will not forgive,

  Saith the Lord.

  Well, God, it’s all very well to talk like this

  And I dare say it’s all very fine

  And Nature and Free Animals

  Are all very fine,

  Well all I can say is

  If you wanted it like that

  You shouldn’t have created me

  Not that I like it very much

  And now that I’m on the subject I’ll say,

  What with Nature and Free Animals on the one side,

  And you on the other,

  I hardly know I’m alive.

  The Parklands

  Through the Parklands, through the Parklands

  Of the wild and misty north,

  Walked a babe of seven summers

  In a maze of infant wrath.

  And I wondered and I murmured

  And I stayed his restless pace

  With a courteous eye I held him

  In that unfrequented place.

  Questioning I drew him to me

  Touched him not but with an eye

  Full of awful adult power

  Challenged every infant sigh.

  ‘Of what race and of what lineage,’

  Questioning I held him there,

  ‘Art thou, boy?’ He answered nothing

  Only stood in icy stare.

  Blue his eyes, his hair a flaxen

  White fell gently on the breeze,

  White his hair as straw and blue

  His eyes as distant summer seas.

  Steadfastly I gazed upon him

  Gazed upon that infant face

  Till the parted lips gave utterance

  And he spake in measured pace:

  ‘All abandoned are my father’s

  Parklands, and my mother’s room

  Houses but the subtle spider

  Busy at her spinning loom.

  ‘Dead my father, dead my mother,

  Dead their son, their only child.’