All the Poems

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,