by Stevie Smith
The satisfaction, the noble-animal dignity, the imperial carelessness!
As Blah lay smiling in her sleep, a shadow crossed the face of Thomas.
He awoke, and putting his arms across Blah’s breast
He stared in a sullen and offended manner at the young intellectual.
Go to hell, cried Thomas. Go to hell, cried the young intellectual.
A purely nervous situation for you I fancy, sneered Thomas.
The young intellectual crept weeping away,
Oh, if he could only experience emotional extravagance!
Who Shot Eugenie?
We had ridden three days Eugenie and I
And kept hidden
By an unnecessary habitual caution
The papers of our commission.
How blank is the heart when on service bent
Empty of all but official content
So inappropriate is all individual consideration
So impossible in the individual a communal realization
Of states’, peoples’, any group-mind’s preoccupation,
That a girl in the service of her country at war
Must have a mind as blank as a wall
Apt only to carry
The terms of her commission and hurry.
Eugenie and I in an open deserted country
Had travelled till nightfall of the third day
When putting our horses at a hedge at the top of a hill,
Up and over,
We found ourselves under cover
Of a mighty forest whose pines’ green needles
Fallen carpeted the ground and silenced our horses’ footfall.
Now night was entrenched and over our head the stars
Shone out their fitful rather disturbing light
That hardly served to penetrate the gloomy thread
Of the long forest ride we rode upon.
Why is it starlight so disturbs our kind
Dissipates the purposes of the human mind
Emptying familiar things of all significance
Setting the thoughts in an inconsequent dance
And making the loftiest and ruling of them sit mumchance?
I said no word of this to her nor she to me,
We were old campaigners both of us you see,
Only we rode, she as I, distracted
And the heart had gone out of us both and the virtue,
We rode in silence.
Hour by hour of the night we rode and the sickle moon
Clearing the feathered treetops soared overhead
And the path we followed led always towards the north,
Skirting a lake. We saw where the arms of trees
Old wood and rotten and allowed to rot and to fall
When it should have been chopped and cherished in the service of nations
(According to the best interpretation of King’s Regulations)
Broke surface.
Over our shoulders from the right the moonlight shimmered
Down and across the waters of the forest lake
Making in semblance more sombre the shadowy margin.
We were glad to leave it, the sombre sinister pool,
And rose till daylight came and the cold dawn wind,
And the stars grew pale, and the moon sank down on the west.
In the gray of the early day we dismounted and watered our beasts,
And breakfasted there by the side of the cold clear spring,
And tethered our horses, and lay and rested and slept,
The sleep of exhaustion. And still no sound,
No least hurry or flurry of wild birds moving,
Spoke of the alien presence of human beings,
The forest enclosed us around and my dreams were always
Of ways without ending and passively hostile Nature,
Of forests deploying and advancing with the power of death
In the huddle of trees and the treacherous undergrowth.
The sun was hot on my face when I woke, and Eugenie was dead,
Shot, with a bullet through her head.
Yet every chamber in her revolver was full to plenty.
And only in my own is there one that is empty.
Full Well I Know
Full well I know the flinty heart
That beats beneath those gentle airs
That asks the people to her hearth
But for a writer’s cares
That asks them from below above
But only to observe, not love.
Then also as a writer she must fail
Since art without compassion don’t avail?
Voices about the Princess Anemone
Underneath the tangled tree
Lies the pale Anemone.
She was the first who ever wrote
The word of fear, and tied it round her throat.
She ran into the forest wild
And there she lay and never smiled.
Sighing, Oh my word of fear
You shall be my only dear.
They said she was a princess lost
To an inheritance beyond all cost.
She feared too much they said, but she says, No,
My wealth is a golden reflection in the stream below.
She bends her head, her hands dip in the water
Fear is a band of gold on the King’s daughter.
Deeply Morbid
Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters
Always out of office hours running with her social betters
But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her
Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her
It was that look within her eye
Why did it always seem to say goodbye?
Joan her name was and at lunchtime
Solitary solitary
She would go and watch the pictures
In the National Gallery
All alone all alone
This time with no friend beside her
She would go and watch the pictures
All alone.
Will she leave her office colleagues
Will she leave her evening pleasures
Toil within a friendly bureau
Running later in her leisure?
All alone all alone
Before the pictures she seems turned to stone.
Close upon the Turner pictures
Closer than a thought may go
Hangs her eye and all the colours
Leap into a special glow
All for her, all alone
All for her, all for Joan.
First the canvas where the ocean
Like a mighty animal
With a really wicked motion
Leaps for sailors’ funeral
Holds her panting. Oh the creature
Oh the wicked virile thing
With its skin of fleck and shadow
Stretching tightening over him.
Wild yet captured wild yet captured
By the painter, Joan is quite enraptured.
Now she edges from the canvas
To another loved more dearly
Where the awful light of purest
Sunshine falls across the spray,
There the burning coasts of fancy
Open to her pleasure lay.
All alone, all alone
Come away, come away
All alone.
Lady Mary, Lady Kitty
The Honourable Featherstonehaugh
Polly Tommy from the office
Which of these shall hold her now?
Come away, come away
All alone.
The spray reached out and sucked her in
It was a hardly noticed thing
That Joan was there and is not now
(Oh go and tell young Featherstonehaugh)
Gone away, gone away
All alone.
She stood u
p straight
The sun fell down
There was no more of London Town
She went upon the painted shore
And there she walks for ever more
Happy quite
Beaming bright
In a happy happy light
All alone.
They say she was a morbid girl, no doubt of it
And what befell her clearly grew out of it
But I say she’s a lucky one
To walk for ever in that sun
And as I bless sweet Turner’s name
I wish that I could do the same.
The Ghost of Ware
I look in the mirror,
Whose face is there?
It is the face
Of the Ghost of Ware.
This is an old house,
The river flows below placidly,
I am enchanted completely
By this ancient city.
I will never leave you,
Dear town of Ware,
I will look into the mirror
Another afternoon and there
I shall see the smiling face
Of the Ghost of Ware.
NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING (1957)
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.
The English Visitor
In the graveyard, in the graveyard
By the tomb of Alan Blair
On the mighty Scottish mountain
Knelt the English visitor.
Oh my darling why did you leave me
To lie so cold where I cannot come,
I only wished to have you by me
In the busy town.
How beautiful are the Scottish mountains
Their backs are like ancient mammoths so quiet
And I should like to walk on the mountain
While it is light.
The people frowned to see her looking,
Alas for Alan that fell in with such a woman
Why is she here, what has brought her?
She has no thought for him.
The Englishwoman rose up quickly
And ran through the gates of the cemetery
And leapt on the mountain boulders
With quick step lightly,
Is that an eagle in the sky wheeling?
No, it is not wheeling but weaving
And it’s too small for an eagle, it is not hard
To tell it is a buzzard.
Oh why are the people so hostile, why are they angry?
They say I come too late
And that Alan’s blood is upon me
But chiefly it is my walking they hate.
Then the beautiful woman ran up the mountainside
As over the top she was spinning
And the people said she would never think of Alan again
And it was typical of Englishwomen.
But No, said an angel, you are wrong
She will think of him freely and frequently
She is not less sorry than you are
Only she was brought up differently.
‘What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good’
What is she writing? Perhaps it will be good,
The young girl laughs: ‘I am in love.’
But the older girl is serious: ‘Not now, perhaps later.’
Still the young girl teases: ‘What’s the matter?
To lose everything! A waste of time!’
But now the older one is quite silent,
Writing, writing and perhaps it will be good.
Really neither girl is a fool.
The Fairy Bell
A renegade poet, having taken to journalism for more money, is rebuked by his Muse in the form of an old gentleman; he cuts her throat.
A dismal bell hung in the belfry
And clanged a dismal tune
And back and forth the bats did fly
Wherever there was room.
He seemed a melancholy but a reasonable creature,
Yet I could see about his hat
As it were this belfry steeple.
The agony through which I go
(He said) is something that you ought to know
And something that you will know too
When I have finished telling you.
He took my hand, I could not choose but stand,
Perhaps for his own sake he should not have done this?
Yet I thought Death was the best prize, if he won this.
Oh, the sad music of the backward and forth
Flying of the bats, pleading for worth,
But in this perhaps again I was wrong?
That there was for him some enjoyment in their song?
It is done now and I cannot trouble to rue it,
I took his gullet in my hand and with my knife cut through it.
But still in my head I sometimes hear the soft tune
Of the belfry bats moaning to find more room,
And the ding-dong of that imaginary sound
Is as grateful as a fairy bell, tolling by waters drowned.
The New Age
Shall I tell you the signs of a New Age coming?
It is a sound of drubbing and sobbing
Of people crying, We are old, we are old
And the sun is going down and becoming cold
Oh sinful and sad and the last of our kind
If we turn to God now do you think He will mind?
Then they fall on their knees and begin to whine
That the state of Art itself presages decline
As if Art has anything or ever had
To do with civilisation whether good or bad.
Art is wild is as a cat and quite separate from civilisation
But that is another matter that is not now under consideration.
Oh these people are fools with their sighing and sinning
Why should Man be at an end? he is hardly beginining.
This New Age will slip in under cover of their eyes.
Well, say geological time is a one-foot rule
Then Man’s only been here about half an inch to play the fool
Or be wise if he likes, as he often has been
Oh heavens how these crying people spoil the beautiful geological scene.
The Blue from Heaven
a legend of King Arthur of Britain
King Arthur rode in another world
And his twelve knights rode behind him
And Guinevere was there
Crying: Arthur, where are you, dear?
Why is the King so blue?
Why is he this blue colour?
It is because the sun is shining
And he rides under the blue cornflowers.
High wave the cornflowers
That shed the pale blue light
And under the tall cornflowers
Rides King Arthur and his twelve knights.
And Guinevere is there
Crying: Arthur, where are you, dear?
First there were twelve knights riding
And then there was only one
And King Arthur said to the one knight,
Be gone.
All I wish for now, said Arthur,
Is the beautiful colour blue
And to ride in the blue sunshine
And Guinevere I do not wish for you.
Oh lord, said Guinevere
I do not see the colour blue
And I wish to ride where our knights rode,
>
After you.
Go back, go back, Guinevere,
Go back to the palace, said the King.
So she went back to the palace
And her grief did not seem to her a small thing.
The Queen has returned to the palace
Crying: Arthur, where are you, dear?
And every day she speaks of Arthur’s grandeur
To the knights who are there.
That the King has fallen from the power
Of his grandeur all agree
And the falling off of Arthur
Becomes their theme presently.
As if it were only temporarily
And it was not for ever
They speak, but the Queen knows
He will come back never.
Yes, Arthur has passed away,
Gladly he has laid down his reigning power,
He has gone to ride in the blue light
Of the peculiar towering cornflowers.
The Lady of the Well-Spring
Renoir’s ‘La Source’
He is quite captive to the Lady of the Well-Spring,
Who will rescue him?
Into the French drawing-room
the afternoon sun shone
And as the French ladies laughed their white faces
Barred by the balcony shadows seemed to make grimaces.
In the far corner of the room
Sat the English child Joan
As far away as she could get but without exasperation
Only to be freed from the difficulty of conversation.
‘Quite captive to the lady of the Well-Spring
Who will rescue him?’
Now I have an excuse to go
Said Joan, and walked out of the window
Down the iron staircase and along the path
And then she began to run through the tall wet grass.
Overhead the hot sun slanting
Fell on Joan as she ran through the fields panting,
Faster faster uphill she goes hoping
That as the ground goes uphill steeply sloping
She will find the well-spring. Into a little wood
She runs, the branches catching at her feet draw blood
And there is a sound of piping screaming croaking clacking
As the birds of the wood rise chattering.
And now as she runs there is the bicker
Of a stream growing narrower in a trickle
And a splash and a flinging, it is water springing.
Now with her feet in deep moss Joan stands looking
Where on a bank a great white lady is lying
A fair smooth lady whose stomach swelling
Full breasts fine waist and long legs tapering
Are shadowed with grass-green
streaks. The lady smiles
Lying naked. The sun stealing
Through the branches, her canopies, glorifies
The beautiful rich fat lady where she lies.
Never before in history
In a place so green and watery
Has lady’s flesh and so divine a lady’s as this is