'To Amuse and Gratify Her Own Self'

In her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), Stevie Smith includes a couplet already suggesting themes that would go on preoccupying her:

 

“All things pass

Love and mankind is grass”.

 

In scripture, grass is the default metaphor for the transience of life. In the drawing accompanying the poem, Smith shows us a couple kissing. The woman is seated on what might be a couch. The man is kneeling beside her on the floor. They embrace. The wall paper is vertically lined and patterned, perhaps with flowers (Smith is no photorealist). Curtains hang in the window behind them. The scene is respectable, middle-class, domestic. Nothing sordid here. Even the life and love of conventional citizens is transitory, which isn’t how we’re supposed to react to a scene of lovers.

 

Such bleak sentiments ought to be depressing, which is never the case with Smith’s poems and novels. Her message is tempered by her manner. Often her poems are rooted in fairy tales, nursery rhymes and Blake, not Leopardi. She is whimsical and deadly serious. Death is everywhere and religion isn’t always consolation. Her instincts are usually comic.      

 

A later poem, “Francesca in Love” (Scorpion and Other Poems, 1972), is also illustrated by a couple embracing, though the kiss is one way. He kisses her rather chastely on the cheek and she looks unimpressed. I assume Smith is giving us her twentieth-century version of Dante’s adulterous couple, Paolo and Francesca. Here are the fourth and fifth of Smith’s seven stanzas:

 

“O love sweet love

Will our love burn

Love till our love

To ashes turn?

 

“I wish hellfire

Played fire’s part

And burnt to end

Flesh soul and heart.”

 

Philip Larkin said of Smith’s poems that he respected their “authority of sadness.” Like Dr. Johnson, Samuel Beckett and Larkin himself, Smith is witty even when the subject is death, despair or everyday human misery. And don’t forget her novels -- Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949). Each is a critique of romance, a fleshed out recounting of “All things pass.”

 

In 2013, Kay Ryan published “Specks,” an interestingly fragmentary essay in Poetry. She quotes and comments on poems by Fernando Pessoa, Robert Frost, Larkin, William Bronk, Emily Dickinson and Smith, who is represented by “The Poet Hin.” Ryan asks, “Why is this so wonderful?” and she answers herself:

 

“Because it is utterly headstrong and meant to amuse and gratify her own self, meant to keep herself good company and also to console her, and along the way stumbles into some wisdom.

 

“The most beautiful thoughts and feelings can barely settle or they break us. We can’t endure more than the briefest visitations. That’s the cruel fact. Almost every writer almost always crushes her own work under the weight of   thoughts and feelings.

 

“Nobody knows how to be light much of   the time. Maybe not even the Dalai Lama. Stevie Smith had some natural advantages, a natural distance from conventional behavior.”

 

Smith was born on this date, September 20, in 1902 and died in 1971 at age sixty-eight.