by Stevie Smith
Why does the Wild destroy
Peace and joy? the Unhappy
Need tears to make him happy?
APPENDIX III – TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR SELECTED POEMS, THE FROG PRINCE AND OTHER POEMS, AND PENGUIN MODERN POETS 8
Selected Poems (1962) [lists only the previously published poems chosen by Smith]
Not Waving but Drowning
The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton
The Blue from Heaven
‘Come on, Come back’
Away, Melancholy
In the Park
Fafnir and the Knights
The Airy Christ
Loin de l’Être
The Singing Cat
The Jungle Husband
Longing for Death because of Feebleness
The Starling
I Remember
Songe d’Athalie
Why are the Clergy …?
The Fairy Bell
Childe Rolandine
Parents
The Queen and the Young Princess
Harold’s Leap
Behind the Knight
My Cats
‘Oh stubborn race of Cadmus’ seed …’
The Ambassador
Thought is Superior
The Deserter
The Afterthought
The Warden
Le Singe Qui Swing
The Weak Monk
The Roman Road
The Death Sentence
Le Majeur Ydow
Cool and Plain
The Conventionalist
Pad, pad
The River God (Of the River Mimram in Hertfordshire)
The Wanderer
The Orphan Reformed
La Gretchen de nos Jours (2)
If I lie down
Girls!
Autumn
Conviction (1), (2) and (3)
The Face
Advice to Young Children
The Governess
Ah, will the Saviour …?
The Virtuoso
The Heavenly City
Love Me!
Dirge
Study to Deserve Death
Lady ‘Rogue’ Singleton
The Broken Heart
The Repentance of Lady T
Happiness
The Magic Morning
My Heart was Full
Croft
The Pleasures of Friendship
Après la Politique, la Haine des Bourbons
Lot’s Wife
Old Ghosts
Satin-Clad
Unpopular, lonely and loving
Hast Du dich verirrt?
Voices against England in the Night
One of Many
‘Ceci est digne de gens sans Dieu’
When the Sparrow Flies
Infelice
Brickenden, Hertfordshire
The Failed Spirit
The Boat
Le Désert de l’Amour
Mother, among the Dustbins
The Deathly Child
The Toll of the Roads
Vater Unser
The Lads of the Village
Nourish me on an Egg
I do not Speak
The Parklands
The Cousin
‘I’ll have your heart’
Flow, flow, flow
Is it Wise?
Upon a Grave
The Fugitive’s Ride
Private Means is Dead
Bereavement
Breughel
Who Killed Lawless Lean?
Portrait
Now Pine-Needles
The Frog Prince and Other Poems (1966) [lists only the prevously published poems chosen by Smith]
St Anthony and the Rose of Life
Anger’s Freeing Power
At School
The Occasional Yarrow
Who is this Who Howls and Mutters?
Will Man Ever Face Fact and not Feel Flat?
A Dream of Comparison
A Dream of Nourishment
Oh What is the Thing He Done?
The Choosers
But Murderous
The Castle
Do Take Muriel Out
Touch and Go
The Broken Friendship
Man is a Spirit
I rode with my darling …
Mr Over
God and Man
Our Bog is Dood
The Rehearsal
The Hat
Wretched Woman
Lightly Bound
Voices about the Princess Anemone
Human Affection
Murder
Poet!
Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime, il faut aimer ce que l’on a –
Dirge
The Wild Dog
Distractions and the Human Crowd
Rencontres Funestes
Be off!
The Film Star
The Bottle of Aspirins
The Devil-my-Wife
The Smile
Forgot!
The White Thought
In the Night
The Fool
The Sliding Mountain
Christmas
The Recluse
Bog-Face
A Man I Am
O Happy Dogs of England
Darling Daughters
Death’s Ostracism
Parrot
I Hate this Girl
The Cock and the Hen
A Father for a Fool
Silence and Tears
To a Dead Vole
Noble and Ethereal
Dear Female Heart
La Gretchen de Nos Jours
Dear Muse
Gnädiges Fräulein
‘… and the clouds return after the rain’
Out of Time
The Children of the Cross
Look, Look
Ceux qui luttent…
The Photograph
Little Boy Sick
Egocentric
Alfred the Great
How far can you Press a Poet?
Night-Time
in the Cemetery
Alone in the Woods
Es war einmal
Infant
Dream
The Bereaved Swan
Bag-Snatching
in Dublin
The River Deben
Never Again
Little Boy Lost
What is the Time? or St Hugh of Lincoln
Major Macroo
All Things Pass
Penguin Modern Poets 8 (1966)
Fafnir and the Knights
The Warden
The Fairy Bell
Was He Married?
A Father for a Fool
Louise
The Bereaved Swan
Night-Time
in the Cemetery
The Magic Morning
My Cats
Not Waving but Drowning
‘Come on, Come back’
Private Means is Dead
The Recluse
Harold’s Leap
The Weak Monk
The River God of the River Mimram in Hertfordshire
The Airy Christ
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
The Wanderer
The Cock and the Hen
Après la Politique, la Haine des Bourbons
Pad, pad
The Jungle Husband
The Blue from Heaven
APPENDIX IV – LIST OF ALTERNATIVE TITLES
Titles given in Collected Poems and Drawings
Arabella (p. 130)
Behind the Knight (p. 265)
Cars (p. 719)
I had a dream … (p. 489)
‘I’ll have your heart’ (p. 163)
Pretty Baby (p. 693)
Private Means is Dead (p. 77)
Ruory and Edith (p. 726)
The Parklands (p. 38)
The Toll of the Roads (p. 103)
The River God of the Ri
ver Mimram in Hertfordshire (p. 273)
To Dean Inge Lecturing on Origen (p. 264)
Vater Unser (p. 152)
Voice from the Tomb (1) (p. 534)
Voice from the Tomb (2) (p. 535)
Untitled illustration (p. 257)
Alternative Titles
White and Yellow (London Mercury)
Post Equitem Sedet Atra (in performances)
No Matter Who Rides (MA)
A Dream (Ambit)
‘Tu refuses à obeir à ta mere …!’ (TOTO)
Sweet Baby (Sunday Times)
Chaps (AGTWHBA)
Ruory (MA)
Pour Envoyer à Sir Oliver Lodge (AGTWHBA)
Poor Tolly (London Mercury)
The River God (HL, CP)
Wisdom (The Holiday Book)
Unser Vater (TOTO, CP)
Here lies … (Poetry Review)
This Heart is Not Cold (Time and Tide)
Torquemada (CP)
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in these notes.
Works by Smith
NOYP Novel on Yellow Paper (Cape, 1936; Virago, 1980)
AGTWHBA A Good Time Was Had By All (Cape, 1937)
OTF Over the Frontier (Cape, 1938; Virago, 1980)
TOTO Tender Only to One (Cape, 1938)
MWIM Mother, What is Man? (Cape, 1942)
TH The Holiday (Chapman and Hall, 1949; Virago, 1979)
HL Harold’s Leap (Chapman and Hall, 1950)
NWBD Not Waving but Drowning (1957)
SAMHTO Some Are More Human Than Others: A Sketchbook (Gabberbochus, 1958)
SP Selected Poems (Longman, 1962)
TFP The Frog Prince and Other Poems (Longman, 1966)
TBB The Best Beast (Knopf, 1969)
SAOP Scorpion and Other Poems (Longman, 1972)
CP Collected Poems (Penguin, 1975)
MA Me Again: The Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (Penguin, 1981)
Selected Poems (1978) was a selection from Collected Poems (1975); all references in the notes to Selected Poems are to the 1962 selection by Smith.
Manuscript Collections
UT The Stevie Smith Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa
BJ The Stevie Smith Archive, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull
Critical Works
SSAS Stevie Smith: A Selection ed. Hermione Lee (Faber, 1981)
SABOSS Stevie: a biography of Stevie Smith (Heinemann, 1985)
SSACB Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (Faber, 1988)
A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL (1937)
A Good Time Was Had By All was published by Jonathan Cape in April 1937. The cover included the illustrations from ‘Suburb’, ‘Beware the Man’, ‘Belvoir’ and ‘Appetite’ with the caption ‘drawings by the author’. Twenty-seven drawings appear in the original volume; for the poems republished in SP and TFP Smith added a further seventeen. She included only twenty-six of the seventy-six poems in her 1960s books, but TFP, the final poetry book published in her lifetime, ends with ‘All Things Pass’ (p. 53).
‘The Hound of Ulster’ (p. 3): the Irish mythological hero Cú Chulainn, popularised by Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902).
‘On the Death of a German Philosopher’ (p. 4): a tribute to Theodor Lessing (1872–1933).
‘Egocentric’ (p. 7): for final couplet see George Wither, ‘Shall I, wasting in despair’ (1617), ll.15–16.
‘How far can you Press a Poet?’ (p. 12): this poem was included at the beginning and end of John Horder’s poem-cycle in Stevie: A Motley Selection of her Poems by John Horder and Chris Saunders (2002).
‘To the Tune of the Coventry Carol’ (p. 15): the earliest surviving MS score for this carol is by Thomas Mawdyke (1591); it forms a set of three carols in the Pageant of the Shearman and Tailors, a Coventry Mystery Play. The carol follows Matthew 2, which recounts the Massacre of the Innocents.
‘The Suburban Classes’ (p. 16): cf. the weekend competition Smith set New Statesman readers in July 1938 to ‘compose, for the friendly use of the German government in England, an Appeal to the people of Great Britain and the Empire seriously to consider the voluntary absorption of themselves – a regrettably separate aryan-blood brotherhood – by the Third Reich’, SSACB, pp. 143–4.
‘Spanish School’ (p. 17): the paintings described are El Greco’s The Crucifixion with two Donors (c.1590), Francisco de Goya’s ‘Y No Hai Remedio’ from The Disasters of War (c.1810), Don Andrés del Peral (c.1798), and Doña Isabel de Porcel (c.1805), and Josepe de Ribera’s Jacob with the Flock of Laban (c.1628); all are held by the National Gallery, London, and Smith references their inventory number for Ribera. For l.24, see Pedro Calderón’s play Life is a Dream (1635), I.ii.
‘Night-Time in the Cemetery’ (p. 19): text follows more heavily punctuated version Smith prepared for PMP; later version has ‘form’ for AGTWHBA’s ‘forms’; illustration substituted for drawing of cat and woman wearing shorts in TFP; CP misprints ‘lie’ for ‘lies’.
‘From the Greek’ (p. 22): see the final lines of Pindar’s Pythian 12. The first line inspired the sculpture of the same name by artist Brent Green.
‘Intimation of Immortality’ (p. 24): cf. William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1806).
‘Infant’ (p. 25): earlier version in NOYP (p.163) is more heavily punctuated.
‘God and the Devil’ (p. 26): for final couplet see Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), ll.220–1.
‘Es war einmal’ (p.27): cf. the eponymous Zemlinsky opera (1902).
‘From the County Lunatic Asylum’ (p. 32): poet John Clare spent 1841–64 in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The 1920 Lambeth Conference denounced the rise of spiritism.
‘Lament of a Slug-a-bed’s Wife’ (p. 34): cf. Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s Going A-Maying’, Hesperides (1648), ll.5–6.
‘The Bereaved Swan’ (p. 35): see Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Dying Swan’ (1830), Sir John Suckling, ‘Why so pale and wan, fond lover?’ (1637), Thomas Hood, ‘The Two Swans’ (1824), and John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820), ll.7–8. Although Smith omitted the poem from SP, confessing to her editor at Longman, ‘I never really liked that “cake of soap”’ (UT, 28 April 1961), it was popular in performance, and was included in the 25-poem selection for PMP and in TFP: drawings were added for TFP. A 1960s performance script of the poem substitutes ‘wrapped’ for ‘hid’.
‘The Parklands’ (p. 38): retitled from ‘Pour Envoyer à Sir Oliver Lodge’ for SP and CP. Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), known for his contributions to wireless telephony, was derided in the 1930s for his spiritualist beliefs. Cf. Wordsworth, ‘Alice Fell’ (1802) and William Blake, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (1794).
‘Eng’. (p. 40): Smith’s use of ‘ci-devant’ (‘former’) invokes its French source, the post-revolutionary nobility in France who refused to accept the new social order.
‘Bag-Snatching in Dublin’ (p. 43): this version follows the revised text Smith prepared for the essay ‘What Poems Are Made Of’ (Vogue, 15 March 1969). The murder of the prostitute Lizzie O’Neill (aka Honour Bright) in Dublin in 1925 was widely reported, and prompted a high-profile trial.
‘The River Deben’ (p. 44): OTF version capitalises ‘darkness’ and ends ‘dawn; thou comest unwisht’. Pompey, the novel’s narrator, explains the poem was written after ‘a weekend I spent with my sister Mary at Felixstowe Ferry’ (p. 113).
‘Death Came to Me’ (p. 46): version in AGTWHBA included these lines after ‘handmaid of extinction’
Had killed a better man than I had ever been
In nineteen hundred and fourteen
These were marked for deletion in the author’s copy, along with the speech marks which open lines 2 and 3 in CP and AGTWHBA. The reference to ‘Mrs Hull’ is an allusion to The Shadow of the East (1921) by bestselling novelist E. M. Hull, which begins with a Japanese woman poisoning herself.
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‘Feminine Charm’ (p. 57): for l.2 see Bion (c.100 bc), Idyl III. Jason was crowned in Thessaly after his quest for the Golden Fleece.
‘Never Again’ (p. 59): for l.5 cf. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BC– 65 AD), Epistle 107:11, ‘Ducunt volentem fata’ (trans. ‘fates lead the willing, the unwilling they drag’).
‘Little Boy Lost’ (p. 60): cf. William Blake, ‘The Little Boy Lost’ (1789).
‘Freddy’ (p. 65): l.3 trans. ‘from an eternal perspective’; cf. Spinoza, Ethics (1675). Spinoza’s philosophy shapes itself around God and nature, moving away from Aristotle’s grounding in practical philosophy and human experience (‘sub specie humanitatis’).
‘This Englishwoman’ (p. 70): cf. Edmund Waller, ‘On A Girdle’ (1645), ll.1–2.
‘Lord Barrenstock’ (p. 71): ‘non flocci facio’ (trans. ‘I don’t care at all’). For ll.15–16 cf. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), ch. 14: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery […] I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can’.
‘Maximilian Esterhazy’ (p. 73): for first line’s ‘stern and wild’, see Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), VI.ii.
‘What is the Time? or St Hugh of Lincoln’ (p. 74): Smith replaced the illustration with a drawing of a boy walking a dog in TFP.
‘Major Macroo’ (p. 75): cf. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’.
‘Private Means is Dead’ (p. 77): retitled from ‘Chaps’ for SP; text follows lineation of final version prepared for PMP, which revises ‘as you may have read’ to ‘as you can read’.
‘Death of Mr Mounsel’ (p. 79): for first line cf. Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra (1607), IV.xv, l.41.
‘Suburb’ (p. 87): cf. T. S. Eliot, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1917).
‘Breughel’ (p. 90): in ‘Syler’s Green: a return journey’ (1946; MA p. 87) Smith calls it a ‘very solemn poem’ inspired by ‘graveyard excursions’.
‘Louise’ (p. 94): text follows the more heavily punctuated version of the poem prepared by Smith for PMP.
TENDER ONLY TO ONE (1938)
Tender Only to One was published by Jonathan Cape in December 1938, described on the cover as ‘poems and drawings by Stevie Smith’. Forty-seven drawings appear in the original volume; eight were added for SP and TFP versions, with new drawings for ‘Dear Muse’, ‘The Lads of the Village’ and ‘“I’ll have your heart”’. She included fifteen poems in SP and a further twenty-one in TFP.
‘Tender Only to One’ (p. 99): cf. Robert Browning, ‘Women and Roses’ (1855), ll.1–3.
‘O Happy Dogs of England’ (p. 100): first published in New Statesman (30 Nov. 1935) as ‘Oh! Happy Dogs!’ with ‘Oh’ for ‘O’ in each instance.
‘The Toll of the Roads’ (p. 103): first published in London Mercury and Bookman (Dec. 1937) as ‘Poor Tolly’.
‘Eulenspiegelei’ (p. 104): scatological and bawdy figure from German folklore, familiar to Smith through Gerhart Hauptmann’s epic poem Till Eulenspiegel (1927).