Like much of Stevie Smith's work, this poem ('The Hostage') makes a reasoned, humorous, and dignified case for welcoming Death, as Seneca and the Stoics did. But it is a useful starting point in other ways, too. The lady's unexplained dramatic situation ('You hang at dawn, they said') is one of many mysterious journeys, fatal or fortunate quests, in Stevie Smith's poems and fictions. Her characters are perpetually saying goodbye to their friends, riding away on dangerous missions, like Browning's Childe Roland, or getting lost in a blue light or a dark wood. One 'lady' is swept off by her huge hat on to a 'peculiar island'; others are magicked out of the real world into a Turner painting, or into the domain of a river-god or of 'the lady of the Well-spring'. The hostage's reasons for wanting to die, and her quizzical reception of Father W.'s well-meant Christian consolations, are quite as characteristic. Stevie Smith is childish, whimsical, fantastical, escapist; she is, equally, tough, pragmatic, satirical (especially of 'the Christian solution' and of the English middle classes to whom she belongs) and intellectually rigorous. Her tone of voice, at once alarming and domesticated, combines these two sides. In the two lines from 'The Hostage', the lady's flat, matter-of-fact colloquial remark, the long, chatty, narrative line, and the purposely obtrusive halfrhyme give an effect at once comical and uncomfortable. Her poems all shoot us this sort of look, and make us 'aware of something comical' going on. They are about feeling funny, and they give us funny feelings.

'The Hostage' is typical, too, in being a conversation piece, in which the lady makes her confession to the priest. Seamus Heaney has called Stevie Smith 'a memorable voice', meaning not only that her own reading voice affected his response to her poems, but also that they are 'poems of the ear'. They make us aware of a relationship between' a speaking voice, a literary voice (or style) and a style of speech shared by and typical of a certain social and cultural grouping—that is, the educated English middle classes. An idiosyncratic speaking voice that accosts the reader, a voice of a particular class, speaking with what Heaney calls the accents of 'disenchanted gentility'—as though the Ancient Mariner had taken up residence in Palmers Green—is, certainly, the most striking quality (and not just of the poems: 'This is the talking voice that runs on', says the narrator of Novel on Yellow Paper). And all kinds of 'speaking' are found in the poems: letters, confessions, prayers, songs, messenger speeches, dramatic monologues, addresses, advice-columns, conversations (some rather one-sided, like 'The After-thought'), Socratic dialogues, debates and arguments. Invocations are frequent: 'Away, melancholy', 'Do take Muriel out', 'Honour and magnify this man of men', 'Girls!', 'Reader before you condemn, pause', 'Crop, spirit, crop thy stony pasture!', 'Farewell, dear friends', and (most of all) 'Come, Death'. This talking voice sounds simple and spontaneous, but is more cunning than it seems. Stevie Smith's manner can be baffling; at times, as D. J. Enright says, one simply asks: 'So what?' The zany, scatty, somewhat Thurberesque illustrations, the eccentric reading manner—she would sing her poems off-key, or recite them in a rather childish voice—the cryptic off-hand oddity of some of the shorter poems, invite dismissive words like 'batty' and 'fey'. Her early reviews were condescending ('Miss Smith is carrying her individuality and eccentricity further than ever', Times Literary Supplement, April 1943; 'Does Miss Smith mean herself to be taken seriously?' Times Literary Supplement, December 1950; 'As with Ogden Nash, a small amount goes a long way toward being enough', Poetry, August 1958). Her reputation grew during the sixties and seventies, and since her death in 1971, Virago's reissuing of all the prose has ensured that she is taken seriously. The other tribute to her popularity, Hugh Whitemore's play (and film) Stevie, unfortunately laid the emphasis on the dotty spinster of Palmers Green, all funny hats and pussy cats. The suspicion that she is an over-rated minor English comic writer is likely to persist; Stevie Smith is a riddler, and has concealed her own complexity. Her fictional heroines' favourite pursuit is unravelling codes and ciphers, and she likes riddle poems ('The Ambassador'), or gnomic verses which can't be understood without their illustrations ('The Rehearsal', 'The Persian'). The larger riddle, however, is how her 'naïve' effects are produced.

She has, to begin with, a very sophisticated and exact sense of line. This can take the form of strong hymn and ballad metres ('To the Tune of the Coventry Carol', 'The Lads of the Village', 'At School', 'Nor We Of Her To Him') or of experiments with a range of metrical forms. She writes in hendecasyllables, in iambic pentameter ('Great Unaffected Vampires and the Moon'), in the eight-stress trochaic tetrameter of Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall' ('The Airy Christ'), or in firm seven or four stress lines ('Anger's Freeing Power' has both). Some poems will infiltrate a strong regular metre into a free running line (as in the second verse of 'Thoughts about the Person from Porlock'); some will change their tune by abandoning a regular metre in the last line ('For a Dead Vole', 'O Happy Dogs of England').

The long conversational line of many of the poems ('The Hostage', 'The Deserter', 'The After-thought' among others) is not as casual as it looks. The rhythms of speech are carefully played into the lines:

Marriage? Out of the question. Well for instance
It might be infectious, this malaise of mine …

as is the sense of physical movement:

As Red and Honey push by,
The old dogs,
Gone away, gone hunting by the marsh bogs.

I can hear Arthur roaming overhead

He loves to roam
Thank heavens he has plenty of space to roam in

The line-endings create suspense and surprise, or a sense of enchanted stasis, like the river-god's

or Persephone's

Oh do not fret me
Mother, let me
Stay, forget me.

Eve and Mary's argument in 'A Dream of Comparison' is established by such suspensions:

'Oh to be Nothing,' said Eve, 'oh for a
Cessation of consciousness … '

Mary laughed: 'I love Life …
That's a feeling, you say? I will find
A reason for it.'

The patient's longing for oblivion in 'The Doctor' is felt through the running-on of her lines:

The transformation of 'The House of Over-Dew' from story to poem ('If it doesn't fall into verse I'm going to help it') shows the creation of this 'casual' line, with its hiatuses and subdued climaxes.

But, oh, when Cynthia heard that word it was the knell to all her life and love. This, she said, is the end of happy days and the beginning of calamity. Over-Dew, she thought, shall be the death of my love, and the death of life. For to that tune, she thought, shall come up a European war and personal defeat.

(The Holiday)

In verse this becomes:

But oh when Cynthia heard that word
It was the knell
Of all her life and love. This, she said,
Is the end of happy days, and the beginning
Of calamity. Over-Dew, she thought,
Shall be the death of my love and the death of life.
For to that tune, she thought,
Shall come up a European war and personal defeat.

The 'free' conversational line is buttressed from within by the use of internal rhymes ('The gray of this heavy day / Makes the green of the trees' leaves and the grass brighter'), alliteration ('salt silt', 'reverent reveries', 'fuel fed fire'), startlingly concentrated monosyllables ('Ah, croaked / The door-set crone, Sun's cloaked') and the repetition of simple key words: 'farewell', 'happy', 'glad', 'tender', 'blue'. Rhyme is her most pronounced device for controlling the line, her favourite kind of joke, and one of her most cunning skills. The rhymes are often purposely unpoetical, McGonagall-ish, or Byronesque: orthodox/shut in a box, praevalebit/in a bit, lent a/magenta, hittapotamus/lost in the fuss, ill-fed/Wilfred, benison/to go on. This flat-flooted comical perversity, which manages to combine despair and high spirits in a quizzical, shrugging way, frequently shades into something sinister, delicate or haunting, like the rhyme of 'curlews' and 'purlieus' in 'The Magic Morning', of 'mother' and 'smother' in 'Perse-phone', of 'phantoms' and 'tantrums' in 'Le Majeur Ydow', or the half-rhyme of 'East' and 'Christ' in 'The Airy Christ'. The poems are full of these elegant, mournful half-rhymes:

There is an island in the lake, old brick walled,
Where the laurestina climbs and is not spoiled.

All her friends are gone
And she is alone

And they talked until nightfall,
But the difference between them was radical.

I am happy, I like the life,
Can swim for many a mile
(When I have hopped to the river)
And am for ever agile.

Her rapid changes in tone, from the maladroit and whimsical to the lyrical, from the faux-naïf to the artful, from the flat and gauche to the resonant, are brought about partly by that mastery of line and rhyme, and partly by an extraordinarily heterogeneous diction. Stevie Smith's poems mix biblical archaisms with genteel suburban clichés, ornate Latinate vocabulary (she loves polysyllabic rhymes like inclement/convenient, temporization/indignation, felicity/sufficiency, consideration/realization/preoccupation) with the most matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxon bathos, (words like 'glum' and 'plod'), invocations to Death and the Lamb of God with silly names like Mr Over or Lady 'Rogue' Singleton. Poems such as 'Aubade', 'A Humane Materialist…', 'The Recluse', and 'Great Unaffected Vampires and the Moon', are lush and clotted with poetic diction. More often, such language will jostle with commonplace, reductive, colloquial idioms (see, for instance, 'My Hat', 'The After-thought' and 'Dido's Farewell to Aeneas') which may themselves take on a peculiar suggestiveness. The not-quite-romantic wan swan 'On the lake / Like a cake / Of soap'; the bodies in the cemetery made more gruesome because they 'have that look of a cheese do you know sour-sweet / You can smell their feet'; the sinister perkiness of phrases in 'The River God' like 'contrary to rules' or 'plenty of go'; the desolating use of 'larking' in 'Not Waving but Drowning'; the ordinary, polite beginning of 'Do Take Muriel Out'; Guinevere's cosy 'where are you dear?' in the strange uncosy 'The Blue from Heaven': these are examples of the arresting effects of this mixture of idioms:

(I often wonder what it will be like
To have one's soul required of one
But all I can think of is the Out-Patients' Department—
'Are you Mrs Briggs, dear?'
No, I am Scorpion.)

Stevie Smith often uses the word 'peculiar', and it is the best word with which to describe her effects.

Though her voice is always recognizable for its peculiarities, it is much given to doing impersonations. Occasionally these move into another 'social grouping' ('Proper done out of 'er rights, she was, a b. shame') but mostly they are middle-class characterizations, like the smug, huffy professional invalid in 'The Deserter':

And every morning the doctor comes and lances my tuberculous glands.
He says he does nothing of the sort, but I have my own feelings about that,
And what they are if you don't mind I shall continue to keep under my hat.

or the malevolent suburban gossip of 'Emily writes such a good letter':

Yes, I remember Maurice very well
Fancy getting married at his age
She must be a fool….

Stevie Smith is a highly literary and referential writer, and one of the peculiarities of her style is the way she infiltrates other voices into her own. Such references range from the ostentatious and insistent to the oblique and concealed. (They range, too, from the accurate to the purposely inaccurate: see my notes [in Stevie Smith: A Selection] to 'God and the Devil', 'Old Ghosts', ' … and the clouds return after the rain', and 'Phèdre'). Some of her best poems are translations ('Dido's Farewell to Aeneas', 'Songe D'Athalie') or free renderings ('Dear Little Sirmio'). Many of them evoke a particular manner or vocabulary, or mix up several at once: 'Our Bog is Dood' and 'One of Many' are extraordinary amalgams of Blake, Hardy, Lewis Carroll and Wordsworth. One of a generation which learned poetry by heart at school, and which knew the Bible and the Classics well, Stevie Smith's mind is a 'rag-bag' of quotations. In an essay on her schooldays, she gives a list of the poems she heard young, which include 'The Ancient Mariner', Tennyson's 'Ulysses', some Milton, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and a good deal of seventeenth-century religious poetry. In her own selection of verse for children, she expresses a preference for 'fiercer' poems, and includes long extracts from the Book of Job, and a great deal of Romantic poetry (Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and parts of 'The Masque of Anarchy', Keats's passage on Isabella's proud brothers, Byron's 'beautifully ratty lines to Caroline Lamb', and Blake's 'The Sick Rose', 'Gnomic Verses', and parts of Auguries of Innocence). Among seventeenth-century poems she chooses Southwell's 'The Burning Babe' and parts of Crashaw's 'Office of the Holy Cross' (from which she often quotes). Her nineteenth-century poems show a liking for the grotesque (Tennyson's 'The Kraken', Melville's 'The Maldive Shark', Poe's 'Annabel Lee') and the heroic (Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome). There is very little modern poetry: Yeats's 'Two Songs of a Fool', Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', Frost's 'Acquainted with the Night', and some of her own.

Stevie Smith is often compared to Blake, sometimes to Edward Lear (Heaney says 'she reminds you of two Lears', the suffering king and the nonsense poet), sometimes to Emily Dickinson. Her fondness for hymns, fairy stories, and nursery rhymes is evident. There are also very marked echoes of the religious poetry heard at school (Crashaw, Herbert, Phineas Fletcher) and of Victorian poets, especially Tennyson and Browning. Mixed with this strong attachment to the English tradition, there is a powerful feeling for Greek and French classical tragedy, for Virgil, Homer, Catullus, Plotinus and Seneca, for the liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer.

Her writing is full of these voices, but their use is complex. The paradox of her art is that it is at once so allusive and so idiosyncratic. Other people's phrases become her own:

… we do not wish to understand … it is for us somebody else's cup of tea that we do not even say: May it pass from us….

I regard them as a contribution to almighty Truth, magna est veritas et praevalebit,
Agreeing with that Latin writer, Great is Truth and will prevail in a bit.

More than direct translation or quotation, she likes half-echoes, reminders, re-workings, travesties. A poem such as 'Old Ghosts' or 'A Dream of Comparison' may be sparked off by a passage from de Quincey or Milton; or a story or poem may be written out of a general feeling for another writer. In this way 'Little Boy Lost' is Blakean, 'The House of Over-Dew' is Tennysonian. She likes to make comically casual, fleeting allusions: 'The funeral paths are hung with snow / About the graves the mourners go' calls up Housman's 'About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow'. 'Cold as no love, and wild with all negation— / Oh Death in Life, the lack of animation' invokes Tennyson's 'Deep as first love, and wild with all regret: / Oh Death in life, the days that are no more'. More elusively, the tone of a poet may be evoked. There are shades of Childe Roland in 'the crescent moon/Performed a devil's purpose for she shewed / The earth a-heap where smooth it should have lain' and an echo of Tennyson (particularly of 'The Poet's Mind' and 'A Spirit Haunts the Year's Last Hours') in 'My soul within the shades of night / Like a languid plant with a fungoid blight'.

Some poems rework whole plays and legends ('Phèdre', 'Persephone', 'The After-thought'), or make play with a well-known anecdote, such as Coleridge's being interrupted in the middle of writing 'Kubla Khan' by a person from Porlock. In her prose she will often retell stories—Euripides' Bacchae or a Grimm fairy-tale in Novel on Yellow Paper, a life of Boethius in The Holiday. She parodies tones of voice: a condescending Church of England vicar, or a self-important literary man, or the blushful, hectoring Miss Hogmanimy, lecturing to schoolgirls on purity and abstinence. In Over the Frontier Pompey has to listen to a bad-tempered academic reading Pater's description of the Mona Lisa: 'the too-ripeness, the concealed verse forms … the dying fall at the end of each paragraph'. Stevie Smith's own voice (itself much given to mingling prose with verse) brilliantly catches the cadence of that sensitive, pulsating, closeted, Anglo-Catholic aestheticism she so fiercely dislikes.

Pompey listening furiously to Pater's dying falls consoles herself inwardly with a satirical line from Juvenal, whom she calls 'a greater than Pater'. Classical rigour set against narcissism, neurosis, melancholia, is the key to her work. D. J. Enright (referring to her preference for Racine because he is more 'truly Greek' than Euripides) says that Stevie Smith's poetry is itself 'somewhat Greek'—'severe, austere, simple, bracing, impersonal'—and goes on to describe her thumping, perverse off-rhymes, her wariness of love and Christianity, her Blakean realism, her stoicism, as 'an avoidance of the romantic'. But Stevie Smith's classicism is coloured by what it criticizes. Her thoughts, like her style, play with contraries: Christianity and paganism, religious fanaticism and the rational intellect, domesticity and loneliness, lassitude and energy, sentimentality and severity, power and escape, human possessiveness and animal (or natural) aloofness, illusions and disenchantment, giving up and going on, love of life and hopes of death. These are not straightforward alternatives. She is, for instance, strongly attracted to 'the Christian solution' (see 'How Do You See?') and has to reason herself out of its dangerous fairy-tale consolations. (Her attempt at compromise is to call herself a 'neo-Platonic Christian'.) Her writing is suffused with 'loamish Victorian melancholy', with tears, longings for oblivion, nostalgia for childhood, quite as much as with classical severity. And her classicism is gothic and barbarous rather than Olympian and serene: she likes best the sinister terrors of Dionysus, or the story in the Iliad of the shades who must drink blood before they can speak, or the prayer of the Roman soldiers who devoted themselves to death in battle. Her Persephone prefers the dark underworld (as well as wanting to get away from mother). 'Pompey Casmilus', the name of the heroine in Novel on Yellow Paper and Over the Frontier, refers us to the 'ambassador' of the gods and the patron of poets, thieves and merchants, and, primarily, to the god who conducted souls to the underworld….

One of her more childish poems has the epigram 'This is not kind', and she says of poetry that, like a classical deity, 'she is very strong and never has any kindness at all'. False, cosy enchantments are dangerous, like the fairy-tale of Christianity. Trusting innocents have to be educated into disenchantment and experience, like the children in 'At School', or the little boy who has to learn how to write a business letter. Innocent childish characters may be 'translated' into another existence (Arthur in 'The Blue from Heaven') or else hung from the gallows ('One of Many') but if innocence is to survive in the real world it must compromise. The poems are full of fierce, lonely misfits who choose not to join in ('Croft', 'My Heart was Full', 'Scorpion', 'The Hostage', 'Magna est Veritas'): they prefer to play simple, as Stevie Smith's poetry does in part. These characters are waiting to be taken away: 'For it was not in this world that the Christians were desirous of being either useful or desirable' she once quoted from Gibbon in a poetry reading. They are passing through this world on the way to something better.

From the eight-year-old infant Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper who makes up her mind that 'Death has got to come if I call him', to the aging Scorpion, who 'so wishes to be gone', Stevie Smith's versions of herself all take the Senecan attitude to suicide, as a noble and encouraging possibility, should life become 'more than I choose to bear'. Many of her poems summon Death as a friend and servant. Her reaction to Virginia Woolf's suicide is tellingly matter-of-fact: 'just generally fed up all round I suppose' (Me Again). But Stevie Smith did not kill herself (she once tried to), nor was she a recluse. Though she admires the simpletons like Croft, she is scornful of characters who give up altogether or fail for lack of courage ('The Deserter', 'The Weak Monk', 'The Recluse', 'The Failed Spirit'). The concomitant of the Senecan attitude to death is a stoicism about life (as in 'Ceux qui luttent…' and 'Away, Melancholy'). People who 'manage to keep going' under pressure or in pain are to be 'honoured and magnified', even if the pretence of being 'jolly and ordinary' and of 'feeling at home in the world' (phrases used during a poetry reading) sometimes breaks down, as in 'Not Waving but Drowning'. Even so, you must

Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

To do any more than that is to be a hero, like Harold, even if the heroic act turns out to be futile:

I would not say that he was wrong,
Although he succeeded in doing nothing but die.

The argument in 'A Dream of Comparison' between Mary, who loves life ('I would fight to the death for it') and Eve, who longs for consciousness to cease ('Storm back through the gates of Birth') is central to all Stevie Smith's work.

These are all very moral poems, you know (Me Again). Under cover of playing simple or looking silly (as in 'Croft') she gives us firm opinions about behaviour. In some of the more didactic poems, like those about cruetly to animals, a nagging tone can creep in:

Of all the disgraceful and abominable things
Making animals perform for the amusement of human beings is
Utterly disgraceful and abominable.

But indignation is an essential part of her writing: she is trenchant, belligerent, acidulous, argumentative, believing with Blake that anger teaches sense. Her most passionate quarrel is with the Church: she distrusts Christianity's 'sweetness and cruelty', and its system of prizes and punishments, she has a horror of religious persecution and fanaticism (see the deceptively comical 'Our Bog is Dood' and 'The House of Over-Dew'), a wry distaste for Jesuitical wiles, and an impatience with the modern Church's vulgar attempts to talk down and to popularize. (There is a furious poem about the alterations to the Prayer Book, and a furious review of the New English Bible in Me Again.) Though she writes some stirring poems of belief ('God the Eater', 'The Airy Christ') her more characteristic treatment of religion is in her fine anguished poems of debate ('Was He Married?' 'Thoughts about the Christian Doctrine of Eternal Hell', 'How Do You See?').

Stevie Smith is a fierce critic of male privileges. Living her whole life in 'a house of female habitation'—Novel on Yellow Paper tells the story of 'daddy's' disappearance and of the Aunt's adoption of Pompey and her sister after their mother's death—she is caustic about the common forms of male chauvinism. Tyrannical husbands like Major Macroo or the 'tigers' of 'Bottle Green', bossy male bureaucrats and smug male writers get short shrift. Sex is fun (cenobites are as bad as dictators) but the boyfriends in the novels are always a bore in the end, and girls who can't say no are urged to be more fierce and proud. Domestic bliss (closely observed on visits to married couples) is outweighed by the pleasures of female friendship and of a gregarious independence, worth the risk of loneliness. And she writes as savagely about the cruelty of children as about cruelty to them.

Her idiosyncratic feminism is only one element in her social and political satire. Here the relationship between prose and poetry is very close: 'Who Shot Eugenie?' is a version of Over the Frontier; the poetic treatment of war ('The Lads of the Village', 'Private Means is Dead'), of the upper classes ('A Father for a Fool') and of the literary establishment ('Tom Snooks the Pundit') is reworked in the fictions; and many of the political poems are put into the novels as part of the long debates on war, empire, government, power, and English society.

Her political attitudes might best be described by comparing her with the great Victorian reformist writers. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Arnold's Culture and Anarchy loom behind her savage moral irritation with English complacency and vulgarity, and the vigorous authority with which she defines the English virtues. She has a passion for English places—Lincolnshire, the Humber, Norfolk, the sea at Swanage, the North London suburb where she lived from the age of three, the Home Counties: 'I suspect that for me Hertfordshire is the operative word' (Over the Frontier). She detests what she considers to be English decadence and preciousness—Pater, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsbury group, Anglo-Catholicism, upper-class inbreeding, homosexuals—as much as she dislikes the middle-class snobbery of the suburbs and the commercial vulgarity of the 'women's' magazines published by the firm she worked for, Newnes and Pearson. All this Old English Toryism is best summed up by her devotion to her Dickensian aunt, with whom she lived in Palmers Green, and whose crabby eccentricities earned her the same nickname as the British Empire's, the 'lion'.

But though opinionated and intolerant, her arguments against tyranny and stupidity are not simplistic. Her painful quarrel with Christianity is symptomatic of how much she is torn and divided. She loves Germany, but sees early in the 1930s to what it is moving. She hates anti-Semitism, but knows what it can feel like, and that a single thought of it can 'swell the mass of cruelty working up against them' (Novel on Yellow Paper). She defends the Empire, but knows that nothing becomes it like the relinquishing of its conquests (as in India). She has no patience with pacifism in the face of the Nazis, but knows that war brings out the darkness in people. In overthrowing cruelty one can become cruel. When Pompey puts on a uniform in Over the Frontier she finds barbarism, military ambition, and the fanaticism of a nationalist ideology latent in herself.

Stevie Smith's political thoughts are realist and anti-romantic. It is not revolutions which stir her, but 'the time when revolutions succeed and must govern', and the pragmatic question of compromise is raised: 'Can resistance pass to government and not take to itself the violence of its oppressors, the absolutism and the torture?' (The Holiday). There must, she supposes, always be 'a loss, a falling off, a distortion', in politics as in Christianity, when 'thought passes into word, idea into action, revolution into government' (Me Again). Nevertheless, for all her satire and grief, she is a meliorist, in the tradition of Victorian writers such as Tennyson and Carlyle. It is 'touch and go', but there are signs that man may be coming out of the mountains. At least 'Man aspires/To good', at least we may be approaching a time when men 'love love and hate hate but do not deify them'. One must be disenchanted, but hopeful:

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.