Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, the second daughter of Charles Ward Smith, a man with a taste for drink and wanderlust and Ethel Rahel, a frail romantic. When she was three she moved with her family to 1 Avondale Road in the London suburb of Palmers Green and then lived in that same house the rest of her life. She was called “Peggy” within her family, but acquired the name “Stevie” as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue. While very young, her father, a shipping agent, left the family to join the North Sea Patrol. After that, she rarely saw him. He appeared very briefly on shore leave and often sent the odd brief postcard (one read – Off to Valparaiso, Love Daddy). Although he and Ethel never divorced, Charles rarely contacted his family and never provided them any financial support. When her mother became ill, her aunt Madge Spear (whom Smith called “The Lion Aunt”) came to live with them, and raised Stevie and her elder sister Molly in what she called a house of female habitation. When she was five, Stevie developed tuberculous peritonitis and was sent to a sanatorium near Broadstairs in Kent, where she remained for three years. She claimed that her preoccupation with death began when she was seven, at a time when she was upset at being apart from her mother. Her mother died in February 1919 when Stevie was 16. The estranged husband, Charles, showed up at his wife’s funeral, displaying uncharacteristic grief; the following year he remarried. That his second wife called him “Tootles” brought forth this comment from Stevie Smith, if he can inspire someone to call him Tootles, there must be things about him I don’t see. She never reconciled with her father and found she was just too busy to attend his funeral 30 years later.
After high school, Stevie Smith attended North London Collegiate School for Girls. She was an average student; she received a prize for literature in high school but no scholarship for a university education. Her sister, Molly, graduated from the university and became a teacher, while Stevie took a six-month secretarial course in London. In 1923, she began work as a secretary with the magazine publisher George Newnes and went on to be the private secretary to publishers Sir Nevill Pearson and Sir Frank Newnes. During quiet periods in her often boring job, she began writing poems. However, it would be eleven years before she had anything published, and it would be a novel, not poetry. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, or Work It Out for Yourself (J. Cape, 1936) drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Written initially over a six week period, it was typed on yellow office paper, hence the title. Her first poetry collection, A Good Time Was Had By All (J. Cape, 1937), contained, as well as her poems, the rough sketches or doodles, which became characteristic of her work. The title took on a life of its own and became a common catch phrase in Britain. A second novel, Over the Frontier (J. Cape, 1938) was dismissed by Smith as a failure. A third and final novel, one she felt was her best, The Holiday (Chapman and Hall, 1949) describes a series of hopeless relationships.
The coming of World War II in 1939 had a profound effect on her. She saw war and aggression as immature male games, but instead of withdrawing into a safe protective shell during those years, she became an air-raid warden and fire watcher in London. After working all day in the office, she went home to have dinner with her aunt, then returned to the city to report on fires from the intense German bombing which was a regular occurrence at the time. It was dangerous, exhausting work, but she persisted. Inflation, caused by the war, forced her to supplement her regular salary by reviewing books. She also tried to obtain a position with the BBC despite her employer’s discouragement. He claimed she didn’t speak clearly and had a lisp, although he probably didn’t wish to lose a valuable employee who would be hard to replace at that time.
She retired from her job in publishing in 1953, following a nervous breakdown, which manifested itself in an attack on her employer with a pair of scissors, after which she attempted suicide by slashing her wrists at her desk. Subsequently she gave poetry readings and numerous radio broadcasts and recordings for the BBC that proved extremely popular. The BBC produced her radio play, A Turn Outside, in 1959, and she frequently appeared on the broadcasting station. The early 1960s were dominated by health problems, an operation on her knee and removal of a benign breast tumor. But she also began to achieve the critical acclaim she craved. Her Selected Poems (Longmans, 1962) and inclusion, alongside Geoffrey Hill and Edwin Brock, in Penguin Modern Poets 8 (Penguin, 1966) brought her to a wider audience.
She was prolific as a poet and published nine volumes of poems in her lifetime (three more were released posthumously). Her most successful collection was Not Waving but Drowning (Deutsch, 1957) which Poetry reviewer David Wright called the best collection of new poems to appear in 1957. He went on to state that as one of the most original women poets now writing. [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no ‘school’—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.” The title poem to that collection became her best known poem (see below.) She was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1966 and won the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1969. Queen Elizabeth II personally made the formal presentation of the award; during a private audience, she met with the poet for 20 minutes. In a typically eccentric gesture, Stevie Smith bought a hat for the occasion at a rummage sale at her church.
Her aunt Margaret, with whom she had lived in the house of female habitation since 1906, died in March 1968, at the age of 96. Stevie Smith would neither move nor renovate the house on Avondale Road. She continued to live, alone, in the Victorian relic that she called her fortress and her cave. In April 1970, she fell, cracked three ribs and injured her knee. The following November she went to stay with her sister Molly, who had had a stroke in 1969, in Devonshire. By early January 1970, she was seriously ill, suffering from an inoperative malignant brain tumour. In Stevie: A Personal Memoir, her friend and executor James MacGibbon describes how, visiting her in Ashburton Hospital, with her speech incoherent but her mind unimpaired, she showed him the typescript of the poem, on which she had made a ring round the word ‘death’ indicating that she wanted to die without delay, after which an understanding doctor sedated her more and more heavily as she slipped quietly away from life. Before the end, however, her head wrapped in a startling pink turban, she was reported to have amazed visitors by performing that final poem Come Death from her hospital bed.
I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I’d ask God to have pity on me,
But I turn to the one I know, and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.
Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp
Come Death. Do not be slow.
Stevie Smith died of a brain tumour on 7 March 1971. She was 68.
NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING
Some poets are best known for just one poem rather than a lifetime’s work. I discuss this in my post on Laura Gilpin and her poem, The Two-Headed Calf, which has a viral status on-line. Were Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning, to appear today, it would also be a viral sensation. As it is, the poem was published in 1957, as part of a collection of the same title. The most famous of Smith’s poems, it gives an account of a drowned man, whose distant movements in the water had been mistaken for waving. She wrote the poem in 1953, during a period of deep depression when she felt too low for words. Although she was quite well-known at the time and had recently performed her poems on BBC programmes, she was having trouble finding anyone to publish her new work. On top of that, she felt imprisoned by the secretarial job she had held for twenty years. Only a few months after writing Not Waving but Drowning, she slashed her wrists in her office. Consequently, her famous poem sounds like a cry for help. The poem was accompanied by one of Smith’s drawings, as was common in her work (shown to the right of the text below). In the 1990’s, the BBC’s book program, The Bookworm, conducted a poll of over 12,000 viewers and listeners to discover the nation’s favourite poems and then published the results in a book entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems. Not Waving but Drowning came in 4th, ahead of Wordsworth and Keats.
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.
It is not difficult to apprehend why the poem has achieved such an iconic status. Although superficially simple in form – comprising three stanzas, all quatrains, rhyming ABCB – and off-hand and demotic in language – “poor chap”, “larking”, “now he’s dead” – it weaves from one perspective to another as it moves from the voice of the drowning man to that of the poet and finally to a melange of both voices. It also has a metaphorical depth that Stevie Smith was well aware of when she introduced the poem on the Poet’s Speak site: I read about a man getting drowned. His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea, but really he was drowning. This often happens in swimming baths or at the seaside. And then I thought that, in a way, it is true of life too. Yet a lot of people pretend, out of bravery really, that they are very jolly and ordinary sort of chaps, But, really, they do not feel at all at home in the world or able to make friends easily. So then they joke a lot and laugh and people think they’re quite all right and jolly nice too. But sometimes the brave defence breaks down and then, like the poor man in this poem, they are lost.
On a simple reading, the poem is about a man who drowns because his movements are mistaken for friendly waving by people back on shore. Viewed less literally, however, the poem speaks, as Stevie Smith acknowledges, of the pain of those who are misunderstood and, from a mental perspective, lost. Clive James recognised this when he suggested that Smith attempted to write the poem so that the diction appeared ignorant of poetic convention, yet was carefully crafted to appear more simple than it was. He describes the relationship between the poet and the speaker thus: her poems, if they were pills to cure Melancholy, did not work for [Smith]. The best of them, however, worked like charms for everyone else.
The image that Stevie Smith composed for the poem (shown to the right of the text above) reinforces the universality of the metaphoric theme. It depicts a silent girl from the waist up, neither drowning or waving, with her wet hair hanging over a face exhibiting a mysterious smile. This image is not of a man waving or drowning. While some have suggested that the “drowning man” is Smith herself (she was noted for using androgyny in her writings) there are problems with reading the poem as a cry for help, due to its humorous tone. Yet Stevie Smith Smith often felt disappointed for her poem’s tone being misunderstood (despite its popularity during the decade before her death), and despaired over Punch’s assessing her Not Waving but Drowning as a funny piece since she intended it as a most touching sad text. Furthermore, when the poem was reprinted in Stevie Smith’s Selected Poems (1962) no drawing was included. That same image was also used to illustrate another poem, The Frozen Lake, one in which a speaker describes his love for a witch beneath the frozen lake with contains Excalibur.
The poem has been set to music numerous times, has been cited or recited in many rock songs, has been the inspiration to stories and was included in the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. It was even used as the title to a 2012 drama film directed by Devyn Waitt. Its iconic status continues to grow.
THE POETRY OF STEVIE SMITH
Most poets can, like restaurants and movies, be judged on a 1 to 10 scale with 1 being awful and 10 being outstanding. The gamut can run from William McGonagall to William Butler Yeats. Bur there are poets who cannot be so easily appraised. Emily Dickinson, for example, creates the terms by which she is to be assessed and these terms do not fall into any conventional numeric scale. The same might be said of Raymond Carver and, in England, of Stevie Smith.
She exists in a poetic universe far from the great tradition of English literature, one in which she participates almost like a parody of the conventional poet. Were the classical English comedy troupe of her era known as Monty Python to have had a woman as a cast member and were that woman to be called, for the sake of comedy, “The Poet”, Stevie Smith might fit the bill. This is not to disparage either her or her poetry, but to acknowledge how much she fits into a peculiarly English strain of eccentricity. And “eccentricity” is the word that is most commonly applied both to her poetry and to her poetic persona. As James MacGibbon, Stevie Smith’s executor, puts in, in his Preface to Stevie Smith: a Selection (Faber and Faber, 1983) Many of her admirers are still inclined to regard her as an eccentric writer of light verse with a wry, even sick sense of the absurd… Although the editor of that selection, Hermione Lee, argues that she tended to be thought of as a minor eccentric, a funny oddity, not as the great original poet that she is, it is possible to counter that she is both an original poet (I leave greatness for others to judge) and an eccentric oddity without diminishing the genuine appeal of her work. It is true that she sometimes bristled at being called eccentric despite, at times, playing to the crowd. And it is also true that she prided herself on a practicality, such as that revealed in her simple couplet All Things Pass
All things pass
Love and mankind is grass.
Her poems, including many of her brief poems presented below, reflect her ability to move almost seamlessly from the sensible to the nonsensical (In the Night) from the solemn to the sarcastic (The Past) from the classical to the contemporary (On the Death of a German Philosopher) from the proverbial French to the colloquial English (Ceux qui luttent) from the French to the Franglais (Le Paquebot) from the faux-naïf to the farcical (Wretched Woman) and from the distant past to the painful present (Old Ghosts). Her tendency to wander or “wobble”, as one of her most astute critics, Seamus Heaney, put it, from the profound to the pathetic revealed a fundamental flaw in her poetry. For him, despite his admiration for some of her poems, the eccentricity was too prominent leading to a retreat from resonance, as if the spirit of A.A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson. He understood and appreciated her concerns: death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting. Coming from a rural Irish background he appreciated the nature of her Englishness, finding in her a disenchanted gentility. But he was disturbed by her manner of recitation, viewing her warbling during readings as a combination of Gretel and the witch and a cross between an embarrassed party-piece by a child… and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso. Yet he acknowledged that Stevie Smith’s own performance of her verse prompted him to revise Auden’s definition of poetry as memorable speech to memorable voice. Cleverly, and ingeniously, he compared her to two Lears: the old King come to knowledge and gentleness through suffering, and the old comic poet Edward veering off into nonsense, acknowledging both the plaintive misanthropy and the comic absurdity. You can sense both his admiration and his frustration in the following comment: her vision [is] almost tragic . . . Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the somber recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express.
He may be right. She was probably far too prolific, tossing off poems as if she was tossing pancakes in the kitchen. Many of these poems are the equivalent of the “higher form of doodling” she practiced in her drawings (see the next section below). However, particularly in the shorter poems, she managed to combine her eccentricity with wit, brio, sarcasm and sheer exuberance. They repay rereading.
THE DRAWINGS OF STEVIE SMITH
Throughout her long career, beginning with her first volume of poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All, (1937) she included drawings alongside her poems. Every collection she published during her lifetime contained her drawings. That interest in illustrations goes back to her childhood where one of her constant delights was to draw. Throughout her life she enjoyed drawing, although she had few illusions about her abilities: I am not a trained drawer, you know. It’s rather more like the higher doodling, or perhaps just doodling without the higher. The relationship between the poems and the drawings was neither consistent nor specific. She doodled constantly on myriad scraps of paper and, if she liked the outcome, she saved the doodles in a box. When she had enough poems for a collection, she would go through the box to find drawings to attach to the poems. At times the drawings became the inspiration for the poems rather than the reverse: When I look through a pile of the drawings, I often am inspired to write more poems.
There are times when poem and illustration compliment each other. The poem Ceux qui luttent and the drawing which accompanies it (see right) are a case in point. The poem begins with a French proverb which translates as Those who struggle are those who live. The pomposity of the French phrase is deflated by the colloquial English of the second line: And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed. There are bilingual rhymes and a bilingual pun. The drawing shows a butcher outside his shop struggling while surrounded by people who luttent a very great deal. Life’s struggle is depicted as such normal activities as shopping and staring out windows. When she read the poem in her radio play A Turn Outside (BBC, 1959) she described how her drawing complimented the poem: It is a half-French, half-English verse, a macaronic poem. In the background are the busy shops on a Saturday afternoon in a poor quarter. People look out of the poor-lodging-house windows above the shops. Down below are the shopping crowds. A little child looks over his shoulder at a butcher with a large knife standing in front of his frozen carcases. As is typical of many of Stevie Smith’s poems and drawings, what is potentially grim is treated in a jocular manner.
There are times when the relationship between the poem and the drawings are far from complimentary. Commenting on the poem All Things Pass and the drawing that accompanies it (see left) Mark Storey, in The Critical Quarterly, had this to say: Above the text a couple – apparently middle-aged and bourgeois – embrace on a chaise longue, in a room with patterned wallpaper and frilly curtains. The Biblical portentousness is thereby channelled into something rather startlingly mundane, a reminder of the banality of truth, or the truthfulness of the banal. Similarly, in the poem, This Englishwoman, the drawing depicts a woman, with a parasol, who is far from refined, thereby adding to the joke. And, alongside the poem Croft about a man in a loft, there is a drawing (see poem and drawing below) of a woman sitting alone. Stevie Smith described this miniature poem as a self-portrait which reinforces the idea of fluidity which characterises much of her poetry.
Most of these drawings were omitted from posthumous editions of her work until Faber and Faber published The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (2015) which contained over 500 works from her 35-year career. The editor, Will May, had this to say of the illustrations he included: Like her poetry, her drawings have eclectic starting points. Some are inspired by the epigrammatic underlines of Goya or the sketches of Georg Grosz, while others skirt closer to Edward Lear. While a few appear to be illustrations to the poems they accompany, many were added to her poems at proof stage or substituted for an apparently unrelated doodle, deliberately unsettling how we might understand a poem’s speaker, tone or addressee. They are as likely to put us on our guard as provide relief. Mostly the images, some of which are included below, are of people, albeit from a somewhat skewed perspective.
These drawings have brought forth mixed reactions. Philip Larkin, who pronounced her work almost unclassifiable said they have an amateurishness reminiscent of Lear, Waugh and Thurber without much compensating felicity. Christopher Ricks found them too cute. Paul Bailey loathed them stating they underline the lapses into coyness, and when they are printed alongside the really good poems they simply seem an irrelevance. I take a more positive view. They may not be artistically adroit. They may be, as Stevie Smith herself called them, higher doodling. But they are also, like the poetry, funny, fragile, and fundamentally weird or eccentric, like the poems, like the poet.
Brief Poems (with drawings) by Stevie Smith
Alfred the Great
Honour and magnify this man of men
Who keeps a wife and seven children on £2 10
Paid weekly in an envelope
And yet he never has abandoned hope.
***
From the Greek
To many men strange fates are given
Beyond remission or recall
But the worst fate of all (tra la)
‘s to have no fate at all (tra la).
***
Beware the Man
Beware the man whose mouth is small
For he’ll give nothing and take all.
***
On the Death of a German Philosopher
He Wrote The I and the It
He wrote The It and the Me
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.
***
From the Country Lunatic Asylum
The people say that spiritism is a joke and a swizz,
The Church that it is dangerous – not half it is.
***
This Englishwoman
This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.
***
Human Affection
Mother, I love you so.
Said the child, I love you more than I know.
She laid her head on her mother’s arm,
And the love between them kept them warm.
***
Croft
Aloft,
In the loft,
Sits Croft;
He is soft.
***
If I Lie Down
If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.
***
Dear Female Heart
Dear Female Heart I am sorry for you,
You must suffice, 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.
***
Mother
I have a happy nature,
But Mother is always sad,
I enjoy every moment of my life,
– Mother has been had.
***
Here Lies…
Here lies a poet who would not write
His soul runs screaming through the night,
‘Oh give me paper, give me pen,
And I will very soon begin.’
Poor Soul, keep silent. In Death’s clime
There’s no pen, paper, notion—and no Time.
***
Autumn
He told his life story to Mrs. Courtly
Who was a widow. ‘Let us get married shortly’,
He said. ‘I am no longer passionate,
But we can have some conversation before it is too late.’
***
The Fool
A couple of women is one too many,
Oh, how I wish I could do without any!
***
She Said
She said as she tumbled the baby in:
There, little baby, go sink or swim,
I brought you into the world, what more should I do?
Do you expect me always to be responsible for you?
***
My Heart was Full
My heart was full of softening showers,
I used to swing like this for hours,
I did not care for war or death,
I was glad to draw my breath.
***
To An American Publisher
You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.
You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.
***
Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime,
il faut aimer ce que l’on a—
Cold as no love, and wild with all negation—
Oh Death in Life, the lack of animation.
***
The Reason
My life is vile
I hate it so
I’ll wait awhile
And then I’ll go.
Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive,
Good may befall
I may yet thrive.
It is because I can’t make up my mind
If God is good, impotent or unkind.
***
All Things Pass
All things pass
Love and mankind is grass.
***
Ceux qui luttent
Ceux qui luttent ce sont ceux qui vivent.
And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed.
But if life be the desideratum, why grieve, ils vivent.
***
Rencontres Funestes
I fear the ladies and gentlemen under the trees,
Could any of them make an affectionate partner and not tease? –
Oh, the affectionate sensitive mind is not easy to please.
***
Wretched Woman
Wretched woman that thou art
How thou piercest to my heart
With thy misery and graft
And thy lack of household craft.
***
The Poets Are Silent
There’s no new spirit abroad,
As I looked, I saw;
And I saw that it is to the poets’ merit
To be silent about the war.
***
She Said
She said as she tumbled the baby in:
There, little baby, go sink or swim,
I brought you into the world, what more should I do?
Do you expect me always to be responsible for you?
***
Le Paquebot
C’est la, la, la,
Le Paquebot a moi,
Dites-moi Goodbye,
Parce-que je go far.
***
Lightly Bound
You beastly child, I wish you had miscarried,
You beastly husband, I wish I had never married.
You hear the north wind riding fast past the window?
He calls me. Do you suppose I shall stay when I can go so easily?
***
Old Ghosts
“By one half as much power as the Roman Centurion.”
De Quincey
I can call up old ghosts, and they will come,
But my art limps, – I cannot send them home.
***
Be Off
I’m sorry to say my dear wife is a dreamer,
And as she dreams she gets paler and leaner.
“Then be off to your Dream, with his fly-away hat,
I’ll stay with the girls who are happy and fat.”
***
The Past
People who are always praising the past
And especially the time of faith as best
Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.
***
In the Night
I longed for companionship rather,
But my companions I always wished farther.
And now in the desolate night
I think only of the people I should like to bite.
***
ANIMULA, VAGULA, BLANDULA,
The Emperor Hadrian to his soul
Little soul so sleek and smiling
Flesh’s guest and friend also
Where departing will you wander
Growing paler now and languid
And not joking as you used to?
More translations of Hadrian’s deathbed poem.
LINKS
Biographical Links
The Encyclopedia.com page on Stevie Smith
The Wikipedia page on Stevie Smith
The Sheila Variations page on Stevie Smith
The Poetry Foundation page on Stevie Smith
The Sublime Silliness of Stevie Smith by Matt Reimann
Poems
41 poems on the Poem Hunter site
40 poems on the All Poetry site
30 poems on the My Poetic Side site
22 poems on the Poetry Foundation site
10 poems on the Interesting Literature site
3 poems (with recordings) on the Poetry Archive site
Drawings
Unpublished Stevie Smith: not waving but drawing
Stevie Smith: Brilliant Poet, Charming Doodler
The Relevance of Stevie Smith’s Drawings
Not Waving but Drowning
Stevie Smith discusses and recites the poem
The Poetry Foundation page on the poem
The Wikipedia page on the poem
The Encyclopaedia.com page on the poem
The LitCharts page on the poem
The Owlcation page on the poem
Huck Gutman’s essay on the poem
Brett Milam’s essay on the poem
Brief Poems 
