By enacting separation and difference, Stevie Smith dramatizes a portrait of the poet as a destroyer of habitual assumptions about affiliation. Her most compelling and characteristic movements are departures rather than arrivals, endings rather than beginnings. Characteristically, her speakers demonstrate an anxiety over intimacy and selfdisclosure.

It is a critical commonplace to note that Smith cherishes unattractive attitudes: a child's rejection of her father ("Papa Loves Baby"); the seductiveness of suicide (e.g., "Tender Only to One" and "Is It Wise"); the guiltfree disposal of enemies ("From My Notes for a Series of Lectures on Murder"). She addresses enthrallment with nonhuman elements, an ethereal fairyland beyond human will. Often, her speakers reserve approval for a state of being that refuses domesticity without veering into the wholly otherworldly. She assumes a precarious position between acknowledging her speakers' needs for intimacy and departing from conventions of intimacy. Smith is a poet who gleefully inverts conventional attitudes. Yet, in the repetitiousness and congruency of her inversions, especially toward conventions of affiliation and unity, her strategies assume a peculiar seriousness.

"Friendship and the revolt from friendship is the stuff of life," Smith writes in her essay "Mosaic" in Me Again; "I am so grateful to my darling friends, to all my darling friends, but for the moment adieu." Such moments of farewell may be one of the more profitable routes for exploring her particularly recalcitrant poetry. Departure exhilarates her speakers:

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,

And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.
("In My Dreams")

Is the speaker about to depart on an actual journey? Or is she about to end her life? The uncertainty of those who are left behind accompanies many of Smith's "goodbyes." Repeatedly, others "don't know" the speaker's destination or her reason for going—or, of course, the speaker's opinion of her friends. Such secrecy preserves the depths of a speaker's self and creates subterranean empowerment. As Sissela Bok observes [in Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, 1983] secrecy "protects vulnerable beliefs or feelings, inwardness, and the sense of being set apart: of having or belonging to regions not fully penetrable to scrutiny, including those of memory and dream; of being someone who is more, has more possibilities for the future than can ever meet the eyes of observers. Secrecy guards, therefore, not merely isolated secrets about the self but also access to the underlying experience of secrecy." Smith's position as a poet who is a woman proves especially revealing, for her speakers may each repeatedly be "someone who is more" than her culture acknowledges. In this context, the speaker's goodbye creates opportunity, for her leave-taking signals that she is between states, neither quite here nor there, ungraspable and peculiarly freed.

Similarly, Smith's leave-takings acknowledge control. Her speakers not only choose to leave situations and to draw attention to their departures but also seek control over separation itself. Significantly, one of Smith's most perceptive critics, Martin Pumphrey, argues [in Critical Quarterly 28, 1986] that "With her playing, Smith created a powerful protective environment for her poems…. Within the charmed upside-down world of her books, it is 'seriousness' that must prove itself, the 'Real' that must justify its claim to authority." Smith's poems present speakers who poise themselves at the entrance to an inscrutable realm; speakers seek release from the constraints of others' expectations and knowledge. Smith's goodbyes confer both moments of power and relief and the psychological satisfactions of anticipating an alteration in situation and, possibly, station.

"Many of my poems are about the pain of isolation," Smith writes in "What Poems Are Made of" in Me Again, "but once the poem is written, the happiness of being alone comes flooding back." Such happiness may seem even less ambivalent than she supposed. For those with little power, opportunity may reside in departures. The ability to "say goodbye" is the ability to grasp some semblance of control from dominant ordering principles, particularly those that exclude women. Consider "Fuite d'Enfance":

I have two loves,
There are two loves of mine,
One is my father
And one my Divine.

My father stands on my right hand,
He has an abstracted look.
Over my left shoulder
My Divine reads me like a book.
Which shall I follow …
And following die?
No longer count on me
But to say goodbye.

A leur insu
Je suis venue
Faire mes adieux
Adieu, adieu, adieu.

Smith emphasizes her speaker's awareness of the division between patriarchs—the natural human father, seemingly uncomprehending and weak, and the Divine Father, seemingly all-comprehending, who "reads" the child "like a book." That the Divine "reads" her in such a way, however, does not mean, in Smith's terms, that he "knows" the child. The child, after all, is not a book. Her fragile self may be ruptured through competing interests as she is caught between conflicting laws. To follow one or the other father means the death of selfhood, for each projects a tyranny. The child's final words, in French, suggest her assumption of difference as a prerequisite to assuming her own right to exist independently. Her adieu is life-saving speech, a refusal to be known in order to render the vulnerable self intact despite the threat of intrusion by ultimate powers, the law of combined patriarchs.

Many such poems function like suicide notes. Through the gesture of leave-taking, Smith's speakers acknowledge and embrace mortality—and anxiety. The farewell appears, for instance, as her personae's ultimate preparation for death. Repeatedly referred to as a friend, death becomes a form of farewell and release, particularly when psychological constriction proves overwhelming: "I am Death, said the angel, and death is the end, /I am Man, cries clay rising, and you are my friend." Critics have amply discussed Smith's seeming attraction to death. Yet, it is not death itself but the strategy of separation implicit throughout much of her work that interests me here and that, I believe, subsumes Smith's attraction to death. Courting death becomes, as a synonym for separation and difference, a strategy for living. The poem "Dirge," for instance, not only presents a persona who is isolated but fearful; in it, death and "the dark night" of separation offer more solace than do human relations:

Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above,
As I fear the friends below.

"Dirge" is reinforced by poems such as "Mrs Simpkins," in which an eternal intimacy proves comically destructive. Mrs. Simpkins is informed by a spirit that "Death's not a separation or alteration or parting"—"It's just a carrying on with friends, relations and brightness / Only you don't have to bother with sickness and there's no financial tightness." Upon hearing such news, her husband "shot himself through the head / And now she has to polish the floors of Westminster County Hall for her daily bread." A spouse's death, as well as her own poverty and continual labor, results as Mrs. Simpkins's punishment for seeking eternal connection.

Such poems discriminate in relationships rather than establish unity. The gesture of goodbye in the context of Smith's poems resists appropriation and the overwhelming demands of intimacy. As such, Smith wars against what Robert Brain calls "a general, undifferentiated friendly feeling" in contemporary culture: "statuses which often required a certain formality in behaviour have been diffused into general, and potentially demanding, friendly roles" [Friends and Lovers, 1976]. The differentiated feeling is Smith's specialty. In particular, her poems draw our attention to the cleansing energies of disaffiliation.

The separations within Smith's own life have been rehearsed frequently: a father who abandoned the family during Smith's infancy; Smith's hospitalization at the age of five for nearly three years in a home for the tubercular; her mother's early death while Smith was still a teenager. The most enduring relationship of the poet's life was with her aunt with whom she shared a home in a North London suburb. The quality of that relationship—perhaps Smith's most intimate—takes on the contours of difference and establishes Smith's ease in dealing with misapprehension. Of her beloved aunt's attitude to her work, Smith told Kay Dick:

Oh, her attitude was simply splendid, everything one asks for really. I should hate to live with a literary aunt. My aunt used to say, "I'm very glad to hear you've got another book coming out, but as you know I don't know much about it. It's all nonsense to me, my dear." I felt this was the right attitude.

The "right attitude" does not grasp for essential understanding, nor does it ignore difference. Smith's poems move beyond her biography to suggest a repressed cultural aversion to expectations of unity and ultimate understanding. This poet's departures serve as responses to ambivalence between longing and actuality—a need for others coupled with a compulsion toward aggression:

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.
("In the Night")

Although Smith frequently foregrounds her ambivalence, she also details cordial relations, primarily based on difference as a positive expression of feeling that honors distinctions rather than emphasizes unity. In "A Dream of Comparison," she places Eve and Mary in a long conversation founded on their differences. Eve, a pessimist, is tired of consciousness; Mary, an optimist, is not. When they most disagree, they are most able to speak:

They walked by the estuary,
Eve and the Virgin Mary,
And they talked until nightfall
But the difference between them was radical.

Sinful and redeemed, primary and secondary, fallen and innocent, these two are nevertheless able to converse—for, at its best, conversation reveals difference. Talk itself is this poet's higher good. Her Helen of Troy loves Cassandra for it ("I had a dream …"), and a middle-aged man bases his proposal for marriage on it: "' am no longer passionate / But we can have some conversation before it is too late' " ("Autumn").

Similarly, many of Smith's poems seek to defeat a limited and stable identity through discovering difference. In a dialogue between two elderly men, a deaf speaker mistakenly assumes that his friend addresses the subject of newts rather than mutes ("In the Park"). Once confusion is dispelled, the initially misunderstood speaker proves thankful for misperception and claims, "Praise is the best prayer, the least / self's there, that least's release." Freedom from the confinement not only of circumstance but also of identity compels Smith's speakers. Blake's proverb "In opposition is true friendship" might aptly describe such relational feeling. The preservation and display of otherness allow for orders of friendly relationship. Crucial to Smith's conception of friendship is an idea that may seen inimical to conventional views of intimacy: Difference allows for greater well-being and less "nerviness and great pain." What may be a personal aversion to intimacy on Smith's part is transformed through her multiple personae into a repressed cultural voice of aversion to intimacy.

In Novel on Yellow Paper, Smith's first novel and one that, tellingly, begins with a farewell ("Goodbye to all my friends, my beautiful and lovely friends"), Smith's protagonist—Pompey—describes the relief of being oneself and none other:

I often think of Alice, and how she was glad she was not Mabel, and how for one dreadful moment she thought she was going to be Mabel. But that is just one thing we don't have to worry about. In our calm and reasonable moments we don't have to worry about that. There are hazards enough in life and death, but Alice can never be Mabel.

Smith prefers to explore separation and disagreement, including pressures upon gender to affiliate: "Alice can never be Mabel." A self without boundaries does not interest Smith; she would rather reestablish ultimate difference.

Repeatedly, Smith's speakers differ in their response from Carol Gilligan's model of women's development. As Gilligan argues, "By changing the lens of developmental observation from individual achievement to relationships of care, women depict ongoing attachment as the path that leads to maturity. Thus the parameters of development shift toward marking the progress of affiliative relationship." Instead of "affiliative relationship," Smith explores separation and disagreement as partial responses to the pressures of gender—especially pressures upon women to assume acts of emotional caretaking. Instead of cultivating affiliation, she reveals the negative desire to create connection in its most extreme forms. "Love Me!" examines the ceaseless wish for love. The poem's title itself is a cry that does not express love but seeks to possess and compel love:

Once I cried Love me to the people, but they fled like a dream.
And when I cried Love me to my friend, she began to scream.
Oh why do they leave me, the beautiful people, and only the rocks remain….

A contemporary Echo whose demand for love defeats love, this persona, with her dreadful need, causes others to flee. Routinely, the desirous are thwarted. Smith examines coercive and repellent need: "I'll have your heart, if not by gift, my knife / Shall carve it. I'll have your heart, your life."

Or consider Elinor:

Unpopular, lonely and loving
Elinor need not trouble,
For if she were not so loving,
She would not be so miserable.

Smith's sense of art itself is dependent upon separation. Her speakers may assume power of another sort; art is not an escape but an encounter with otherness. In "Deeply Morbid," a typist enclosed in a stifling office prefers to be "Solitary solitary": "It was that look within her eye / Why did it always seem to say goodbye?" Art, as Smith suggests, moves beyond the human into realms barely supported by civilizing structures. The woman of goodbyes escapes constraints by entering a painting by Turner: "The spray reached out and sucked her in." Her fate within the painting is "a lucky one / To walk for ever in that sun." Smith cultivates a resourceful wit and the impulse of the unempowered: to leave. Art offers release from human closeness that oppresses. And should circumstances forbid our actual relocation in space or through art, the ultimate leavetaking of death awaits such speakers.

In this context, Smith's attraction to animals may prove illuminating, for animals serve as one of the few reprieves from the anxiety of intimacy that she affords her speakers. The nonhuman provides an opportunity to depart from coercive feeling. In Smith's Collected Poems, a full-page drawing of a woman and a lion proves emblematic. The woman, her hands bound before her, declares "I believe." Opposite her and glaring, a lion asserts "I do not." Belief often unites us with a group; through declarations of our difference, we may be shunned. More frequently, Smith actively prefers to explore the latter state. The nonhuman refuses assimilation; belief seems to bind the woman, as her manacled wrists suggest. Significantly, it is the lion in Smith's drawing that presents greater power, assuming the last word, just as the effort of refusal and difference generally marks Smith's conclusions. The same drawing appears above the poem "The Roman Road":

Oh Lion in a peculiar guise,
Sharp Roman road to Paradise,
Come eat me up, I'll pay thy toll
With all my flesh, and keep my soul.

Consumed by the lion, the woman would be transformed into lion flesh and yet would maintain her spirituality. The human woman with bound hands seems a prisoner of her faith before the power of the bestial. To be consumed is a higher good—a way of release and yet also a means of contact with the animal self.

In "A Shooting Incident," Smith meditates again on the attraction of animals: "And oh I find and oh I bless / A comfort in this emptiness." Her prose may illuminate the subject further:

There is something about the limitless inability of a beast to meet us on human ground, that cannot but pique, and by pique attract; at least if we are in the mood for it, perhaps, at the moment, too thronged by too-ready human responses, sick of the nerves and whining of our own human situation vis-à-vis our fellow mortals. (Me Again)

The pain of consciousness and of a forced cultural congeniality is overturned by animals. Similarly, the call to "abandon all things human" seduces her speakers:

They photographed me young upon a tiger skin
And now I do not care at all for kith and kin,
For oh the tiger nature works within.

Parents of England, not in smug
Fashion fancy set on a rug
Of animal fur the darling you would hug.

For lately born is not too young
To scent the savage he sits upon,
And tiger-possessed abandon all things human.
("The Photograph")

"Poetry is very strong and never has any kindness at all," Smith wrote in her essay "My Muse" in Me Again, aligning poetry to her imagery of animals. The tiger skin might replace a civilized veneer; it is to be wished, Smith suggests. The animal departs from human norms and pressures to maintain a socially constructed identity.

Ultimately, Smith courts her readers' isolation. "And then of course, if one's lonely, one often feels rather superior too," Smith wrote. And "One is different from other people, is one not? … (Aloft / In the loft / Sits Croft / He is soft … may be their point of view about it, but it is not ours)" (Me Again). Paradoxically, Smith assumes intimacy with the reader even while championing distance and solitude. As in her exploration of farewells, her strategy both acknowledges otherness and resists appropriation—and yet signals an awareness of social convention. It is, after all, only polite to say goodbye. And while Smith's poems seem to speak of a cultural repression, an anxiety of intimacy, they also suggest her anxious preoccupation with questions of amity and closeness.

"Not Waving but Drowning," Smith's best-known poem, may be particularly revealing in this context. The gesture of waving, like that of farewell, serves as the drowning speaker's signature and Smith's own. In exile from his world, which is "too cold always," the speaker has been "much too far out all [his]" life. The speaker is already a "dead man" "moaning"—both his life and death met with misunderstanding ("Nobody heard him"). This poem pointedly is not all pity but is partly parodic. While the dead man's gestures have been misunderstood throughout his lifetime, even in death he attempts the impossible: "still he lay moaning." How could his isolation be more complete? Or his attempts more fruitless? The second stanza presents a voice of communal failed comprehension struggling to render an overall explanation for death; such a voice would pretend understanding of the nature of both a life and a death. The poem derives much of its power from an absolute refusal to console and its fixed atmosphere of isolation. Public gaiety contrasts with private misery. Isolated incident as viewed by an undiscerning public is actually a private unrelieved state for the dead man. Smith conflates the actions of waving and drowning so that each takes on the character of the other, for the wave signals a desire for help and by implication a farewell as the speaker meets his death. The form of the poem itself, its group narrative enclosed by the private narrative of the dead man, represents a miniature drama of difference.

Smith's gestures of farewell suggest isolation and yet simultaneously establish her attempts to control experience. She seeks to discover a means of psychological release from an oppressive social climate while maintaining the integrity of a self. Her "goodbyes" signal her refusal to be entirely known and, as such, appropriated. She reevaluâtes affiliation and women's traditional responsibility of emotional caretaking through departures that assume difference. Each departure represents a shift away from conventionalized consciousness, a deliverance of sorts that she believed necessary to a state of art for both the reader and the artist. Like her animals, her farewells intimate removal from "human ground" and "too-ready human responses."

In "Why Stevie Smith Matters," Mark Storey argues that "a poet who can so challenge our preconceptions should be cherished" [Critical Inquiry 21, 1979]. I argue that Smith's sense of difference and her targeting of emotional caretaking and unity within relationships mark much of the distinctiveness of her poems. It is separation—in departures, in death, in the recesses of art, in the nonhuman—that allows her to venture into new areas of feeling and to enunciate an anxiety of intimacy. And it is through this anxiety of intimacy that the peculiarly insinuating quality of her work maintains its threat.