by Stevie Smith
I want to be your pinkie
I am tender to you
My heart opens like a cactus flower
Do you thinky I will do?
My heart is like a cactus
Not like a cactus flower
And I can kill love
Without entering her bower.
So they both thought. But he was silent and she said:
I cannot see which way you are pointing, the sky is so dark red,
And when the sandstorm is over I shall lie down on my bed.
Portrait (2)
My mother was Dutch
My father a Jew
And that is why I
Am so different from you.
I like to sit and pry and peer
And poke and watch the light of fear
Shine in your eyes
As I grow wise
And my sagacious fingers press
The very root and core of your distress.
Shall I make my fingers pause
Stay a while and turn and cause
The intellectual ray I so despise
Fade in your eyes,
Drowned by the tears that rise
Because my touch is wise?
To a Dead Vole
Now Vole art dead
And done is all thy bleeding.
Thy soul is sped
And all thy body’s heeding
For daily bread
And comfortable bed
Has brought thee where there’s no more thought of feeding,
And where the soil is thy last unappreciated quilt.
Arabella
White and yellow were the flowers
Shed on Arabella’s bier.
Bright and mellow were the hours
Sped in which I called her Dear.
Oh my Arabella, why
Did you leave me here and die,
Leave me here beside your bier
To lick a salt and solitary tear?
The Deathly Child
The deathly child is very gay,
He walks in the sunshine but no shadow falls his way,
He has come to warn us that one must go who would rather stay.
Oh deathly child
With a heart of woe
And a smile on your face,
Who is it that must go?
He walks down the avenue, the trees
Have leaves that are silver when they are turned upon the breeze.
He is more pale than the silver leaves more pale than these.
He walks delicately,
He has a delicate tread.
Why look, he leaves no mark at all
Where the dust is spread.
Over the café tables the walk is going to and fro,
And the people smile and they frown, but they do not know
That the deathly child walks. Ah who is it that must go?
Reversionary
The Lion dishonoured bids death come,
The worm in like hap lingers on.
The Lion dead, his pride no less,
The world inherits wormliness.
Dear Karl
Dear Karl, I send you Walt Whitman in a sixpenny book.
‘How dilettante’, I hear you observe, ‘I hate these selections
Arbitrarily made to meet a need that is not mine and a taste
Utterly antagonistic, wholly alien, egregiously coercionary
Of individualism’s, egotism’s, insolence’s light-fingered traffickings.’
Put a leash on your indignation; hold it on a tight short leash,
Muzzle it in a tough criss-cross mesh of temporization and impartiality.
‘God, I have no such dishonourable merchandise, such tinsel and tawdry in my shop window.’
So you say. Then borrow or steal a muzzle to muzzle your indignation,
A criss-cross wire mesh of temporization and suavity, and with a muzzled and leashed wrath
Hanging on your tapping heels: Listen.
If I had what hypocritical poetasters crocodilely whining call lucre and filthy,
But man, and it takes a man to articulate the unpalatable truth,
Means of support, if I had this and a little more,
I would give you Leaves of Grass, I would send
All of Walt Whitman to you with a smile that guesses it is
More blest to give than receive.
For I, I myself, I have no Leaves of Grass
But only Walt Whitman in a sixpenny book,
Taste’s, blend’s, essence’s, multum-in-parvo’s
Walt Whitman.
And now sending it to you I say:
Fare out, Karl, on an afternoon’s excursion, on a sixpenny unexplored uncharted road,
Over sixpennyworth of tarmac, blistered by an American sun, over irrupted boulders,
And a hundred freakish geology’s superimpositions. Fare out on a strange road
Between lunchtime and dinner. Bon voyage, Karl, bon voyage.
In Canaan’s Happy Land
Fair waved the golden corn
When I was stepping out,
And all the churchyard bells they rang
The day I turned about.
It’s nice to get abroad,
It quickens and refines,
But now I find myself at home
My heart to peace inclines.
The bells ring for my friends
Who were untimely slain,
But I was luckier than they
And go my rounds again.
I take the cart I took,
I take another horse,
I sell my goods from door to door
And smother every curse.
Proud Death with Swelling Port
Proud Death with swelling port comes ruffling by,
He takes the worthy man and leaves the fond.
So many worthy men and they must die,
And all the foolish men stay still beyond
The shadow of Death’s beckoning. O let them go
And save man’s nobler sons and daughters from Death’s blow.
Thou wilt not do it, Lord, still wilt thou take
First fruits of our integrity and strength,
Tithes of our wisdom thou wilt have, and make
Our loftiest sons sink to a coffin’s length.
O spare them Lord, take toll of lesser men,
For it is certain they will come again.
Men of great moral stature are not born
So easily as men of lesser worth.
But in the steep captivity forlorn
Of Time’s entrail they slowly draw to birth.
After such long gestation, hast no ruth
To eat them up on the first flower of youth?
O spare our nobler sons and daughters, give
Them space to grow and feel their sinews’ might
And hearts’ full beat. O Father, let them live
Throughout life’s day, and in the cool of Night
That is the cloak of natural death take them away.
But while the song is up still let them stay.
My Soul
In the flame of the flickering fire
The sins of my soul are few
And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed
With a solitary view.
But the eye of eternal consciousness
Must blink as a bat blinks bright
Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled
On the brink of eternal night.
Oh feed to the golden fish his egg
Where he floats in his captive bowl,
To the cat his kind from the womb born blind,
And to the Lord my soul.
In My Dreams
In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.
In my dreams they are
always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don’t know what I think.
Noble and Ethereal
Noble and ethereal he sped upon his way,
And never Bishop blithe as he about the meadows gay.
He thought upon the Saviour’s blood so freely spent for him,
And with a thankful heart he trod about the river’s brim,
There for a moment, stood at stare, with meditative eye
He saw within the limpid stream the fishes hurry by.
And all Creation seemed to him a tranquil joyous song
Where never plain had place at all or spite of Ancient Wrong.
He savoured that sweet moment’s pause, all Heaven in a day,
And knowing yet his hour not come, he bravely turned away.
Dear Female Heart
Dear Female Heart, I am sorry for you,
You must suffer, that is all that you can do.
But if you like, in common with the rest of the human race,
You may also look most absurd with a miserable face.
How Slowly Time Lengthens
How slowly time lengthens from a hated event.
In my youth I was humiliated in a guilty association –
Insinuator, flatterer, Board of Trade Surveyor, hypocrite,
Aha, Hildreth Parker, how have the years dealt with you?
The Man Saul
The man Saul
Is very tall.
He stands at the cross-bar where the shadows fall.
He stands in the shadows, he is a shadowed man,
God haunted since he first began,
God daunted, now he is looking very wan.
Deep are the furrows on his brow.
He stands like the figurehead at a ship’s prow.
This ship has been wrecked a long time now.
Shadowed Saul, I am sorry for him.
He is the victim of a God’s whim.
He was exalted and now he is cast down, now he is very dim.
And only for the memory of a glory
That was not his, they tell the story.
Ah, he must clench his hands so tight his nails are grown gory.
Blood flows beneath his finger nails,
Blood is beating in his head, he rails.
But for all his vaunt he knows that all within him fails,
Fails and grows faint and turns to death.
He is betrayed from within, there is no thought beneath
That crowned crest that does not pant upon last breath.
I am sorry for Saul,
There is no help for him at all.
He stands where the shadows fall.
The River Humber
No wonder
The river Humber
Lies in a silken slumber.
For it is dawn
And over the newly warm
Earth the mists turn,
Wrapping their gentle fringes
Upon the river where it hinges
Upon the perfect sleep of perfected images.
Quiet in the thought of its felicity,
A graven monument of sufficiency
Beautiful in every line the river sleeps complacently.
And hardly the dawn distinguishes
Where a miasma languishes
Upon the waters’ farther reaches.
Lapped in the sleeping consciousness
Of its waves’ happiness
Upon the mudbanks of its approaches,
The river Humber
Turns again to deeper slumber,
Deeper than deeps in joy without number.
La Gretchen de Nos Jours (1)
Would he might come
Again and I
Upon his breast
Again might lie.
Would I had not
In foolish wrath
Driven him ever
From my path.
Would that the sun
His day’s course over,
Might that same day’s
Lost dawn recover.
As vain as this
Vain prayer are all
Vain prayers that would
Past days recall.
Never shall sun
Now sunk away
Rise up again
On yesterday.
Never shall love
Untimely slain
Rise from the grave
And live again.
Nourish Me on an Egg
Nourish me on an Egg, Nanny,
And ply with bottled stout,
And I’ll grow to be a man
Before the secret’s out.
Nourish me on an egg, Nanny,
With bottled stout to drink,
And I’ll grow to be a man
Before you can think.
Nourish me on an egg, Nanny,
Don’t wring your hands and weep,
Bring me a glass of stout,
And close my eyes in sleep.
Dear Muse
Dear Muse, the happy hours we have spent together.
I love you so much in wet or fine weather.
I only wish sometimes you would speak louder,
But perhaps you will do so when you are prouder.
I often think that this will be the next instant,
Meanwhile I am your most obliging confidante.
Souvenir de Monsieur Poop
I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature,
I believe tremendously in the significance of age;
I believe that a writer is wise at 50,
Ten years wiser at 60, at 70 a sage.
I believe that juniors are lively, to be encouraged with discretion and snubbed,
I believe also that they are bouncing, communistic, ill mannered and, of course, young.
But I never define what I mean by youth
Because the word undefined is more useful for general purposes of abuse.
I believe that literature is a school where only those who apply themselves diligently to their tasks acquire merit.
And only they after the passage of a good many years (see above).
But then I am an old fogey.
I always write more in sorrow than in anger.
I am, after all, devoted to Shakespeare, Milton,
And, coming to our own times,
Of course
Housman.
I have never been known to say a word against the established classics,
I am in fact devoted to the established classics.
In the service of literature I believe absolutely in the principle of division;
I divide into age groups and also into schools.
This is in keeping with my scholastic mind, and enables me to trounce
Not only youth
(Which might be thought intellectually frivolous by pedants) but also periodical tendencies,
To ventilate, in a word, my own political and moral philosophy.
(When I say that I am an old fogey, I am, of course, joking.)
English literature, as I see it, requires to be defended
By a person of integrity and essential good humour
Against the forces of fanaticism, idiosyncrasy and anarchy.
I perfectly apprehend the perilous nature of my convictions
And I am prepared to go to the stake
For Shakespeare, Milton,
And, coming to our own times,
Of course
Housman.
I cannot say more than that, can I?
And I do not deem it advisable, in the interests of the editor to whom I am spatially contracted,
To say less.
Vater Unser
to the tune of the ‘Londonderry Air’
Vater Unser,
Du Der im Himmel wohnst,
Behold thy child,
His prayers and his complaint.
He was conceived
In sin and born to set it on,
This sin is his,
His strength to act upon.
Oh, Father, heed
Thy child, let not the grave
Seal him in sin
Beyond they power to save.
Strike at his strength,
Leave weakness only for her vaunt,
Vater Unser,
Du Der im Himmel wohnst.
Gnädiges Fräulein
In the cold light of morning she was looking rather queer,
In the cold light of morning, with a ribbon round her hair,
And her youth lay behind her a long time for many a year.
For when she was young, they took her love away
And sent him to work, beyond the Mexique Bay,
And she thought of him and lost her wits and now her hair is gray
With an, Oh, if I think of him he’ll come again to me,
And an, Oh, it was but a whim that took him o’er the sea;
And an, Oh, for all my eyes are dim they can look lovingly.
The Friend
We needs must love the highest when we see it,
And having seen it knowing lower flee it.
But whither flee
Exiled from bliss
In these sad days
Of nothingness,
Shall we,
Trailing the tired wing of happier flights,
Hemmed in by lower presents mourn past heights,
And in a phrase
Of bitterness
Throw
All our woe?
No, gentle soul,
If fate and all the world have wronged thee,
And every spectre of despite has thronged thee,
Keep fast
Thy visionary past,
A part of present’s whole
And but a part.
Thus happiness
And grief in thy stout heart
Shall range thee higher than th’angelic bands
Who know bliss but no smart
And serve
With happy but not midnight clenched hands
A lower place deserve.
But thou of present depth and former height
Has highest height attained and needst no flight.
The Lads of the Village
The lads of the village, we read in the lay,
By medalled commanders are muddled away,
And the picture that the poet makes is not very gay.
Poet, let the red blood flow, it makes the pattern better,
And let the tears flow, too, and grief stand that is their begetter,
And let man have his self-forged chain and hug every fetter.
For without the juxtaposition of muddles, medals and clay,
Would the picture be so very much more gay,
Would it not be a frivolous dance upon a summer’s day?
Oh sigh no more: Away with folly of commanders.
This will not make a better song upon the field of Flanders,