A search of library resources on British poet Stevie Smith reveals that scholarly interest in her poetry has deepened in the nearly half-century that has passed since her death in 1971. The following analyses focus on five poems by a writer who to date has famously defied attempts at categorisation, and who was truly a maverick and a rebel. Stevie Smith’s commitment to being herself makes her an inspiring example of courage and steadfastness for women readers.

Relatively early in the developing Stevie cult, Martin Pumphrey summarised the uniqueness of her poetry as follows: “Mocking but not committed, arch rather than revolutionary, neither distinctly ‘romantic’ nor ‘classicist’, Smith stands out as a wilful, isolated, slightly worrying figure” (Critical Quarterly, Vol. 28:3 (1986): 86). Worrying for whom, one wonders? In this lecture I apply some of Pumphrey’s comments to selected poems, focusing on their “use of play and fantasy”; on how they “subvert cultural categories”; and how the poetic persona resists definition and fixity (Pumphrey 86-87). I’ll apply these notions to Stevie Smith as a poet whose approaches to feminism, Christian belief and other topics are fluid and unique.

“No Categories”

“No Categories!” is an appropriate starting point for our analysis (Stevie Smith. Selected Poems. Ed. James MacGibbon. Penguin, 1982: 141). It incorporates an underlying opposition that takes different forms in Stevie’s poetry, between

• the real and ideological categories that society constructs,
• and a world that flourishes outside this construction presented sometimes as nature, sometimes as fairyland, and sometimes as an individual invention.

Pumphrey suggests that these “outer” and “inner” worlds correspond to the public and private spheres of experience. However Stevie is characteristically ambivalent and ambiguous in her presentation of both. In “No Categories!” the world that transcends categories is joyful and free, but others of Stevie’s poems associate it with the loneliness of outsiders.

Approximations to this same division into “outside” and “inside” occur in two prose works by other women authors studied in this course.  In both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, women characters look for a “place” in which they can live in freedom, unconstrained by conformity to social categories. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a story which unlike Stevie’s poems is unambiguously bleak and at times nightmarish, this outside “place” is madness. In Between the Acts Isa Oliver, a middle-class wife and mother who lives on an English country estate, escapes from her life of boundaries and conventions into private reflections and fleeting fantasies that include a purely imaginary romance.

In “No Categories” Stevie makes her point by contrasting what she sees as the joyful random energy of God’s creation with categories, here ironically identified with the hierarchical orders of Angels. People who conform are the “Angels” who receive society’s approval and rewards, but Stevie their world as one of frustration, severity, authority, disapproval, plodding, divisions, hierarchies, ambitions and pride. She sees scholars, moralists, and spiritual aspirants as helping the Angels to create this restricted reality. By contrast, the place of escape from categories is creative, joyful and free: “In the day of his gusty creation/ He made this and that/ And laughed to see them grow fat.” (Fat is a feminist issue, a sign of nonconformity in women of Stevie’s day, though for us in the twenty-first century perhaps mainly a health issue.) However, “No Categories” isn’t at all the only poem in which Stevie overturns feminist expectations by associating God with human freedom and self-expression. The speaker of this poem is perfectly clear: she prays that God will not just “laugh…aside” at the Angels’ impositions of order on his vigorous, playful creation, but that God will “scatter/[the Angels’] pride; laugh them away.”

“No Categories” therefore states a central aim of Stevie’s poetry–to “laugh away,” or “play away” social boundaries. In relation to feminist political theory, this is precisely the project advocated by Julia Kristeva : the breaking down of the one binary opposition which she sees as the basis of all others, namely that between the masculine and the feminine. (See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen 1985: 12.)

“Persephone”

In “Persephone” (MacGibbon 134-36) Stevie again explores two opposed but ambiguous realities, namely the social, sunlit world of Persephone’s innocence, and the exiled, wintry land of her experience. Doubts about the world of innocence begin in stanza 1, with the humorous irony, suggesting conformity,  of “a background of social security.” Stanza 2 opens with a positive assertion: “Oh what a glorious time we had”, but immediately questions it: “Or had we not?”, and proceeds to satirise the slick categories of “good” and “bad” into which society divides people, especially when addressing children. In stanza 3, “doll-faced” associates the upper world of Persephone’s childhood with the passivity and conformity expected of girls–at least at the time of writing–linked with a painted-on attractiveness. From this Persephone escapes by the force of her own independent decisions: “I struck;” “I reached out and plucked….” Yet the positive connotations of sunlight and open fields in the upper world oppose these negatives. In spite of what she says, they do arouse the reader’s “wonder” at Persephone’s revolt.

A similar ambiguity, or refusal to judge definitively, adheres to Hades, where Persephone is brought by “the dark King” (Pluto or Dis, the god of the underworld, the home of the dead). At the end of stanza 3, motifs of threat and terror accompany Persephone’s decision to pluck “the flower of winter thunder”, and Stanza 4 is full of ominous portents in nature. Yet there’s an inevitability about the decision and its results that mimics children’s unstoppable progress into adulthood.  Now inhabiting the halls of Hades, Persephone mourns the loss of her mother and feels for her grief. She does not regret her loss of her father, who according to myth was Zeus, named in the poem as ruler of the “fair fields of Italy and sunny fools.” In a complication typical of Stevie which reflects the way that adult children often relate to their parents, Persephone’s journey to adulthood, marked by sexual experience and a nominal queenship over her husband’s realm, is also seen as a necessary and desirable escape from Demeter’s “smother.” This refers to Demeter’s inconsolable grief and determination to return her daughter to her protection, whatever this may cost her daughter and others. Yet despite suffering “Snow-drifts on the fingers burning,” Persephone chooses to remain in her “new land learning”  There will be “No returning” because at last she recognises, in a classically balanced juxtaposition, that, “In this wintriness/Is my happiness”. Persephone commits herself to adult experience, whatever the danger and suffering this may entail. The poem hints, nevertheless, that the power of “the dark King” will limit her autonomy in her “new land.” Has she substituted maternal domination for domination by her husband?

The poem entices the reader to explore the teasing contradiction between Persephone’s childhood and adult worlds. Both are flawed, yet both also offer gifts and advantages. Stevie’s simple, often childlike, words mimic a universal human quandary, especially for women–the choice between childishness and maturity, between parents and spouse. Instead of resolving the quandary. Persephone” holds these opposites, together with their complications, in balance.

An attempt to resolve the balanced antitheses might run as follows: “the poem’s subject is growing up. It depicts a development away from the protection and security, the illusory brightness of childhood, into the harsh real world, in which adult happiness is to be won, if at all, at the cost of struggle and pain: ‘Does my husband the king know, does he guess/ In this wintriness/ Is my happiness?’.” I hope you can see how this authoritarian, moralistic reading, based on a world-view of “either…or” flattens out the ambiguities in the poem’s balanced presentation of its contrasting worlds.

Conversely, a feminist reading that respects the poem’s cultivated ambiguities, might run as follows: “‘Persephone’ undercuts a binary opposition. In the usual metaphor, the sunlit upper world represents consciousness and reason, which is the masculine side of the hierarchical binary opposition reason/passion (see Moi 104-105 for a list of these). But in Stevie’s poem, this bright upper world is primarily, though not exclusively, the world of Persephone’s mother. The dark underworld on the other hand represents passions and instincts, which a long cultural tradition characterises as feminine. However the poem associates this underworld with its male ruler, who initiates Persephone, not into reason, but into sex and adulthood. A fundamental binary opposition is thus not only reversed; it is confused (mixed up). Even though “Persephone” creates startling new combinations of feminine reason and masculine passion, it approves neither. Instead Stevie undermines their very existence –“No Categories!”

Finally, a “psychological” feminist, experience-based reading of “Persephone” might run as follows: “Stevie’s poem is about the difficulty women often face in reconciling their independently-chosen rational and individual goals, i.e. the sunny fields of joyful play ruled by the mother goddess Demeter, the creative female principle; with the underworld of passionate physical fulfillment and human love ruled by the male god Pluto.”

“The Hound of Ulster”

“The Hound of Ulster” (MacGibbon 21) juxtaposes a favourite childhood myth enshrined in a popular song – “How much is that doggie in the window?” — with a story from Irish folklore. The Hound of Ulster was a fearsome watchdog which the hero Cuchulain defeated when he was still a child. This poem further exemplifies what Pumphrey calls Stevie Smith’s “exploration and subversion of cultural categories.” Two categories ( a modern song and an ancient tale) are brought into close juxtaposition, and in the last four lines intertwined, in a way that destabilises both.

An adult speaker and a child are in dialogue. In the first stanza, the voice of the adult constructs the “childhood-puppy-shop” myth. The short lines and feminine rhymes create a merry playful mood, which adults deem appropriate for children. This beginning encourages the reader to dismiss the whole poem as “non-serious.” The repetition of “dogs” underlines the stanza’s simplicity: an innocent speaker is offering a cheerful list. However the heavy stresses in the last line: “His name is Belvoir,”put an end to the rapid, happy rhythm.

When “the child” speaks the second stanza, the generic expectations of both children’s verse and adult myth-making are overturned. The “child’s” speech is polysyllabic and old-fashioned (“I am beguiled”). Instead of a syntactically simple list, the “child” speaks a complex sentence, joined together by a conjunction (“But”) and containing a subordinate (and spooky) question: “What lurks in the gray/ Cold shadows at the back of the shop?” Where the adult speaker in the first stanza uses rapid, short rhymes, the child rhymes on long vowels or diphthongs – “child”/”beguiled”; “pray”/”gray”–that suggest gravity and concern–anything but merriment. These poetic techniques undermine the binary opposition (opposed categories)  of child and adult. The characterisation of the child becomes ambiguous and elusive.

The first three lines of the adult’s reply in the third section try to recapture her earlier mood. The last four lines however replace conventional myth-making with a myth much more distant and profound. In another reversal of categories, the adult has learned from the child and she or he answers in away that replicates the grave tone of the child’s question. Like the child’s speech, the four lines of the adult’s reply are long and rhyme on long vowels or on diphthongs: “there”/”hair”; “pale”/”sale.: The myth of the Hound directly opposes the myth of the puppy-shop in the ominous description given: the Hound is tethered, with closed eyes and pale lips, in contrast with the liveliness and movement of the other dogs.

Again, Stevie offers no short-cut to interpretation.

• A psychological reading might be that the poem is about a child’s discovery of mortality, the “grave” truth that underlies the the world’s brightness and liveliness, which the adult takes pains to conceal with a socially sanctioned myth.
• A feminist interpretation might stress the escape from conventional myth-making (and from society) offered by both the myth of the Hound and the child’s simplicity and profundity. (Kristeva, you’ll remember equates the feminine with whatever is outside or peripheral, and this poem points steadily to the outside.)

But the poem itself refuses to validate or guarantee either of these approaches, or in fact any approach. It resists conventional interpretations; it plays with and teases the reader, and so holds up for inspection, or  de-naturalises cultural categories, in this case poetry as an expressive medium, and culturally-sanctioned pursuits, in this case literary criticism.

In relation to poetic style in “The Hound of Ulster,” Pumphrey argues that the cultural categories of “serious” and “non-serious” literature are another target of Stevie Smith’s poetry, which perversely refuses to belong to either. In their existence as artifacts, her poems in themselves challenge a socially-invented and socially-approved categorisation, originating as all categories do, in a binary opposition.  Stevie’s poems cause discomfort and inspire questioning by readers who have been brought up to accept such oppositions as real and solid; her poems invite the reader to look beneath surface respectability, including the respectability of “serious” literature. 

“Sunt Leones”

The Latin title of this poem, meaning “They are lions” or “There are lions,” transports the reader back to ancient Rome. Apart from this, “Sunt Leones” (MacGibbon 42) is a complex poem of imbricated or overlapping meanings. These function like the levels of tiles in a roof. Each level briefly suggests to the reader that it is at the top, but it is soon replaced be a another level of meaning rising up from halfway underneath it, this is replaced by a another, and so on. “Sunt Leones” is a good example of the delight that Stevie Smith takes in teasing her readers. However the zany humorous descriptions end in a chilling realisation.

The first level of meaning that the reader encounters is the whimsical or playful level. It introduces a subject not often considered–the lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena–and treats it in a mock serious way. The opening lines of “Sunt Leones” contain some polysyllabic bureaucratic and anthropological phrases: “indulging native appetites”; “Not entirely negligible part”; “initiatory rites”; “contemporary art”; “Liturgically sacrificial hue.” The contrast between this distancing, complex language and the subject matter creates a whimsical effect, suggesting to the reader that this is comic verse, and preventing a serious response. The couplet that concludes the poem’s first section climaxes this trend:

And if the Christians felt a little blue —
Well people being eaten often do.

This is very funny, and the colloquial simplicity contrasts with earlier lines. Nevertheless, the gruesomeness of the subject matter is likely to inspire doubt that humour is the poem’s whole intention. In fact from as early as line 6–“Initiatory rites are always bloody”–the martyrs’ violent deaths begin to coalesce into a sub-text–another imbricated level–underlying and threatening the top level’s linguistic playfulness.

At line 13–“Theirs was the death and theirs the crown undying”–the alliterating antithesis: “death…undying,” the noun-adjective reversal, “crown undying,” the crown metaphor in itself momentarily seduce the reader to identify with the lofty idealism of sermons and hymns. However the colloquialism and litotes of the next, reveals that line 13 is a parody. The idealism of self-sacrifice is undercut by the unlikelihood that this “state of things” could, in reality, be satisfying.

At this point, the reader is likely to feel uncertain or exasperated at this poem’s sudden radical shifts in tone, and the undercurrents of horror that swirl beneath its humorous, whimsical surface. In other words, to quote Pumphrey, a “cultural category,” the appearance of “Sunt Leones” to belong to the genres (levels), first of humorous and secondly of religious poetry, has been disrupted.

Next the poet’s first-person persona steps in with a promise to explain her point, “which up to now has been obscured” (line 15) to her flummoxed reader. Yet this explanation has the opposite effect of teasing the reader even further, since Stevie can hardly intend seriously to attribute the Church’s growth to the arena lions. Nevertheless, the two couplets that conclude her poem reassert that this is indeed is why she is writing this poem. The persona has presented herself from line 15 (“my point is…”) as the reader’s helper, but that mask (or imbricated level) is stripped away almost at once, and a different, enigmatic and impenetrable mask (or new level of tiles), is put on in the poem’s final statements. This final mask pretends to be that of the authoritative author, who has stepped into her composition, but it is only too clear that it is a mask, just another level, like the others. This is the end (the last in the sequence of levels), and the reader has nowhere to go in his or her search for an explanation.

Yet backtracking reveals the glimmer of a serious message in lines 17 and 18. These stress the physical horror of the martyrs’ deaths: “By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone/ The martyrdom on which the Church has grown.” According to an often repeated saying that originated with the patristic writer (or Church father) Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240), “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (“semen est sanguis christianorum”). The serious message then, seems to be the primacy of the human being over the institution, suggesting that no institution is worth such sacrifice. If present, this message may appeal to women who often confront or live with or conform to patriarchal institutions. But this is to build speculation upon speculation, in response to a poem that is overlaid with the poem’s teasing complexities. Stevie refuses to assume the authoritative poetic stance which might confirm this message. Thus another “cultural form” (that of the omniscient author) is “contested.”

Furthermore, for a reader who knows Stevie Smith’s biography a further complexity on a yet another level presents itself. Stevie was brought up by her Aunt, whom she called “the Lion”, and who was the one constant love of her life. This seems relevant to the generation of “Sunt Leones,” and especially to the last line, where “Lionhood” has a capital letter. Presumably a private, complimentary pun is present here. If so, the poem falls between the categories of private and public verse, weakening their boundaries, and bringing yet another binary opposition into contention.

“Freddy”

Pumphrey’s further describes Stevie’s poetry as “juxtapos[ing] the (private/secret) world of play and magical possibility with the (public) known world of the conventionally Real,” and in this way “contest[ing] cultural forms and assumptions”. “Freddy” (MacGibbon 46) is a good match for this description. It satirises the blindness, conventional expectations and pretensions of the “public” world, while the poet’s persona–the “I” speaker–finds real joy in committing herself unreservedly to a “private” relationship, one that is certainly “magical.”

The poem’s “public known world” is sub-divided into the two contrasting “meelyoos” (social levels) inhabited by the poet-speaker and to Freddy: “In the pub lub lights they say Freddy very dim” (line 8); “In the tennis club lub lights poet very dumb” (line 25). Antithetical statements stress the distance between these binary levels, while the childish speech suggests the folly of such divisions. This is the world of the poet’s “pub” and of Freddy’s “restaurants” and “tennis club.” They can’t come together in this public world of rigid opposing categories.

The couple’s friends and relations who belong to this dual public world tell Freddy and the speaker to formalise their love publicly by marriage. Stevie satirises the world’s suburban side by parodying upper middle class speech, with its predilection for foreign terms as a sign of sophistication or of time passed at school or university. The anglicised French word “meelyoo” parodies upper-middle-class pretentious speech, as well as the very idea of milieux, i.e. social levels. The same applies to the German coinage “anheimate mich” [feel at home], while the phrase, “the ha-ha well-off suburban scene” (line 23) imitates the sound of polite (and probably insincere) social chit-chat. Another line makes fun of the sexual mores of middle class suburbia, where men as traditional patriarchs and bread-winners are more desirable than women: “Where men are few and hearts go tumtytum” (line 24). This hints at women’s pursuit of men for money or social standing.

Freddy’s and the poet’s private world contrasts radically with all this. It is in their private world that the poet and Freddy truly become one. Their love is erotic, real and immediate. It is filled with the energy of passion. It is free from the deadening effects of public recognition or social endorsement. As an intense inner reality and a true joy : “He is his and my own heart’s best/ World without end ahem.”, Stevie is almost prepared to say that this love transcends time, but the “ahem” (instead of “Amen”) ruins the certainty of  this set ending many prayers.

Even so, the speaker is totally content that this love is present fulfillment. Who knows, and who cares how long it will last? “Freddy’s” lyrical simplicity and colloquial language confirm that this isn’t a tormented, tragic or romantic love.  Poetry belonging to the European “courtly love” convention, which began in the early Middle Ages and reached its zenith in English Renaissance poetry, such as the sonnet sequences and other love poems of Shakespeare, Sidney, Drayton, Spenser etc., never comes to terms with the reality that human love, however deep and true, cannot last. But “Freddy” defies the romantic myth of a love which lasts for ever, in favour of an energetic and blissful passion, as naive and joyful as children’s play, and as uncertain in duration. The statement, “I love him sub specie aeternitatis” [in the sight of eternity], is corrected to, “Where speaking sub specie humanitatis [as natural members of the human species]/ Freddy and me can kiss.” Most readers will approve the change; the love celebrated in “Freddy” escapes romantic ideology by its immediacy, its lack of structure, and its carefree acceptance of its human vulnerability to time. In the context of the long tradition of tormented love, this acceptance is a radical and refreshing change.

Furthermore, the last two lines of “Freddy” declare that whatever the time span turns out to be, whether long or short,  this will be enough for perfect fulfillment: “There’s all of Tom Tiddler’s time pocket/ For his love and mine.” This refers to “a children’s game, in which a player designated Tom Tiddler tries to catch the other players who invade the area designated as his property; a place (as a no-man’s-land) where pickings may be sought or had without effective interference” (Merriam-Webster). The invading players recite: “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s ground,/ Picking up gold and silver.” According to Stevie, therefore, Tom Tiddler’s “time pocket” will be cosy enough, have gold and silver enough, and last long enough for Freddy’s and her shared love to be perfect and complete.

Finally, this private world of love is natural and outdoors, not urban or suburban. It is free, not enclosed in restaurants, pubs and clubs. It belongs to “the open saltings/ Where the sea licks up to the fen” (lines 9-10); and in farmland–“a haystack’s ivory tower of bliss” (line 27). Just as the sexual connotations of “haystack” (roll in the hay), transforms the cliché of the “ivory tower” (studious and disengaged university life) so Stevie’s and Freddy’s love evades the intellect and takes joy in the body and feelings.

Conclusion

Stevie Smith’ short, humorous and readable poems invite readers to question some of our leading assumptions, namely society’s unequal and hierarchical categories of class and gender. In opposition to categories, Stevie states the claims to freedom and joy of childhood and outdoors nature. (Categories are strongest in cities and indoors.) In opposition to canonical literature, especially love poetry, Stevie evokes an energetic and rebellious sexual love, uncluttered by expectations or long-lasting commitment. In addition, Stevie’s poetry interrogates the foundations of the historical Church as an institution that denies primacy to humanity and feeling.