Among tales of sixties poetry festivals, jazz-infused events that sometimes drew crowds in the thousands, one finds the legend of a woman in her sixties, small and frail, wearing schoolgirl dresses and white stockings, often sharing the stage with a much younger, denim- and leather-clad male gang. Such a setting (like that of a jewel) encapsulates a dominant impression of Stevie Smith's relationship to other poets, since a striking originality, a complete separation from poetic fashion, is for many the hallmark of her work. Yet the key appeal of Smith's immensely popular, show-stealing performances was not her oddball appearance but rather her voice, as she spoke and sang her poems in a chanting, off-key manner that could be hilarious and haunting, powerful and unsettling.

Detached from her inimitable delivery, this highly stylized manner still comes through to Smith's readers, producing many comments on the "voice" of her poetry itself. Robert Lowell thus speaks for others when he warmly notes "her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice," a quality many would identify in her best-known poem:

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.
(Collected Poems)

Critics see the peculiar Stevie Smith manner in this poem's radical ambiguity of tone: it is "tragi-comic," "toughly poignant," an epitome of her work in the "gleeful macabre." Never mind that Smith herself casually described "Not Waving but Drowning" as "most touching" (Me Again). She offset such commentary by publishing the poem with a drawing which, as two critics observe, can reinforce the poem's comic incongruities—the speaking dead man, still being misunderstood—since the picture shows a woman standing in water merely to her waist, gazing from behind long hair which hangs like a limp curtain across her face. Though publishers and reviewers often balked at Smith's cartoonish drawings, her "doodling" (as she called it) functions like her voice in performance; working for another audience—for visual rather than aural effects—her drawings insure that the poems present their dark subjects in the enigmatically simple, disturbingly comic manner which, to many readers, marks her distinctiveness as a poet.

But, as Christopher Ricks notes [in The Force of Poetry, 1984], such "unmistakability" can be perceived as a limitation, and features which enhance Stevie Smith's individuality can be made into a case for her marginal status. "Original" and "memorable" then waver between praise and criticism, a shift apparent in the mixed assessments Smith received from two fellow poets, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Larkin's reviews foreground her originality yet persistently qualify her achievement, especially when he asserts that many poems are marred by "facetious bosh," so that a person "could never forget" while reading "that this was a Stevie Smith poem" [Observer 23, January, 1972]. Heaney's evaluation [in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, 1980] similarly moves from suggesting his admiration for her "memorable voice"—an unforgettably distinctive style—to finding fault with that style, as an "eccentric" manner which undercuts her universal, "central" thematic concerns: "the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre recognitions, the wounded joie de vivre, the marooned spirit we sense they were destined to express." The result is "a retreat from resonance," so that her poems fail to achieve the "large orchestration that they are always tempting us to listen for." Larkin [in New Statesman 28, September, 1962] and Heaney even coincide in depicting Smith's failures in terms of a distasteful copulation: "like William Blake rewritten by Ogden Nash"; "as if the spirit of A. A. Milne successfully vied with the spirit of Emily Dickinson."

Heaney's assumptions about centrality and "large orchestration" easily mingle with Larkin's condescending dismissal of Smith's "bosh"; both wave a red flag, inviting feminist opposition. What these poets take as failure has been defined by Martin Pumphrey [in Critical Quarterly 28, 1986] as "carnivalesque" subversion of the authoritative persona, a strategy used by other women poets. Pumphrey argues that Smith's style incorporates "children's culture"—fairy tales, nursery rhymes, nonsense verse—in ways that challenge patriarchal assumptions, including conceptions of "serious" literature. While Pumphrey justifies the "simple," "childlike" (one might say deliberately non-resonant) poetic style, I propose to take another tack, to suggest that the "resonance" Heaney misses is indeed a primary characteristic of Smith's poetry, but that descriptions of the poet's "voice" have functioned to limit her range. Smith's work in the vein of Blake's songs or Edward Lear's light verse, along with her doodle-like drawings, has led some readers to stress the "childlike" or subversive poems while overlooking her numerous jaded, world-weary speakers, her bracing, tough-minded arguments, and her many highly traditional poems. The 570 pages of Smith's collected poetry not only encompass remarkably varied impersonations but also exhibit diverse poetic modes and forms, from eerie ballads to prosaic, contemporary stories of failed romance, from satiric epigrams to works of theological polemics. Hence, rather than emphasizing her singular voice or stylized manner, we can approach Stevie Smith as "a dramatist of voice" [according to Calvin Bedient in Eight Contemporary Poets, 1974], whose work, as Hermione Lee observes [in the introduction to Stevie Smith: A Selection], highlights disparate types of speech, including "letters, confessions, prayers, songs, messenger speeches, dramatic monologues, addresses, advice-columns, conversations …, Socratic dialogues, debates and arguments." This emphasis on speaking voices and dialogues is unusually intense and deserves further analysis.

Mikhail Bakhtin once described himself in words that could fit Stevie Smith: "I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them." Though Bakhtin is still sometimes perceived as exalting the novel and denigrating poetry as a contrastingly monologic form, this assessment of his position has been persuasively revised by scholars who show that, on the whole, he suggests the dialogic and monologic potential of both genres. His work then opens the way for analysis of dialogic effects in Smith's poems, as they match his ideal of texts which present an unresolved clash of perspectives—an open-ended dialogue—rendered in distinct "languages" or voices. Yet multiple speakers enable Smith not only to explore conflicting points of view but also to focus on articulation and communication—two of her persistent thematic concerns. As she probes the problems and possibilities of speech, the pain and attraction of silence, Stevie Smith deploys mixed or interacting voices in a number of effective ways.

Consider, for example, her explicit representation of people or viewpoints as "voices," a strategy foregrounded by several of her poems' titles. We can gauge the effects of this device in "Voices about the Princess Anemone," a poem which focuses debate on a self-exiled heroine:

Underneath the tangled tree
Lies the pale Anemone.

She was the first who ever wrote
The word of fear, and tied it round her throat.

She ran into the forest wild
And there she lay and never smiled.

Sighing, Oh my word of fear
You shall be my only dear.

They said she was a princess lost
To an inheritance beyond all cost.

She feared too much they said, but she says, No,
My wealth is a golden reflection in the stream below.

She bends her head, her hands dip in the water
Fear is a band of gold on the King's daughter.

Distinctive features of this characteristic poem stand out through contrasts with two poets' similar works. In situation, imagery, even wording, Smith's "Anemone" matches Blake's "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found," paired songs whose heroine, Lyca, lies safely "Underneath this tree," while her parents fear she is "Lost in desart wild." Though two of the illustrated plates show Lyca reclining beneath a tree, in one the tree is composed of twisted trunks, utterly entwined, an exact model for Anemone's "tangled tree." Yet despite these obvious links, the poets' ideas differ sharply. Blake suggests Lyca's lack of fear in the realm of nature (including sexuality) as the key which eventually frees her parents from their fear. Smith's "Voices about the Princess Anemone" offers a much more elusive, and perhaps disturbing, portrait of a woman who clings to her fear, investing it with imagery of betrothal and wealth, as "a band of gold," a wedding ring or crown.

The deviance of "Anemone" shows even more plainly through contrast with another treatment of the royal, worldrenouncing hero, Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus?" The opening lines of both poems present the forest as symbolic locale, and Smith's "tangled tree" recalls Yeats's "deep wood's woven shade." But Fergus is associated with active verbs, "drive" and "pierce"; he represents the quest to penetrate a realm outside ordinary social existence and consciousness. By sacrificing his worldly power, he has gained the imagination's power over the whole world: he "rules" all things, including "the white breast of the dim sea." Anemone is a much more passive figure, one who lies beneath the tree, "bends her head," merely letting "her hands dip in the water." And as though in direct contradiction to Yeats's advice to "brood on hopes and fears no more," Anemone lies absorbed in her "word of fear"; like Narcissus (another flower), she seems captive to a "reflection."

Structural differences between the two poems can further illuminate Smith's characteristic procedures and concerns. In contrast to Yeats's single-voiced exhortation to follow Fergus, Smith presents "voices about" her protagonist, so that Anemone can seem to be criticized in the poem's initial narration, as well as by the lines showing what "they said" about her fear and her loss. But the poem adds the woman's contrary viewpoint and may be read as sympathetic to Anemone, whose removed, contemplative life in "the forest wild" may represent a woman's attempt to look inside herself, for the wealth gained by reflection upon her fear. The "word of fear" which is Anemone's "only dear" may be Death, the beloved or "only one" in another Stevie Smith poem, "Tender Only to One." That Anemone "wrote" this word and "tied it round her throat" may then symbolize Smith's own commitment of her writing and her throat, her voice, to speaking her fear. For Arthur Rankin, [in The Poetry of Stevie Smith: "Little Girl Lost", 1985] Anemone is Smith's self-portrait, one suggesting that "her haunting anxiety and her sense of isolation are central to her poetic inspiration." [In The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Writers, edited by Jeni Couzyn, 1985] Jeni Couzyn lends support to this reading: "Fear is a recurring theme in her poems, but rather than having the effect of paralysis, it rises through them as a source of power and energy." Yet, though Anemone may seem to reflect Smith's views and preoccupations, the poem's polyvocal structure impedes easy adoption of this reading.

The dialogic play of voices about the outsider Anemone primarily serves to spur the reader's engagement in sorting out values and world views. But contending voices also function figuratively in Smith's poetry, as failures to hear and communicate become her most consistent and potent images of human isolation. In "Not Waving but Drowning," the outsider's desperate need to be "heard" comes across through the voice of the drowned man, attempting to correct a fatal misinterpretation: "I was much further out than you thought / And not waving but drowning." Much like "Voices about the Princess Anemone," this poem juxtaposes a group's view, "It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, / They said," with the outsider's denial, "Oh, no no no, it was too cold always." As Catherine A. Civello observes [in Explicator 42, 1983], the "abortive dialogue" encapsulates the element of misunderstanding and alienation in which the man has always struggled.

Kindred cases of fantastic, insistent, but under-heard speakers reappear in Smith's "Voice from the Tomb" series and in "The Wanderer," her most richly traditional depiction of alienation in terms of voice and hearing, an emphasis apparent in the poem's first lines:

Twas the voice of the Wanderer, I heard her exclaim,
You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again,
She taps as she passes at each window pane,
Pray, does she not know that she taps in vain?

Never seen, but only "heard … at most," the "pitiful ghost" in this poem expresses the exile's longing to be taken back within the nurturing home. Yet Smith's speaker questions the wanderer's position, as the second stanza asserts,

But would she be happier if she were within?
She is happier far where the night winds fall,
And there are no doors and no windows at all.

The poem's uncanny, plaintive visitant recalls the ghostly Catherine of Lockwood's dream in Wuthering Heights, heard through tapping at the window and through cries expressing a similarly regressive desire to return home. And like Brontë's multivoiced narrative presenting Catherine's chronic sense of displacement, Smith's alternating voices both convey the female exile's unappeasable desire and question whether she would indeed be "happier … within." Both writers exploit conventions of the gothicromantic ghost tale, yet where Brontë emphasizes spatial imagery (of houses and moors, inside and outside), Smith characteristically uses aural images (of tapping, sighing, speaking) to stress impeded communication, the insurmountable isolation of the perpetual outsider, whose "voice flies away on the midnight wind."

Aside from its symbolic structure of antiphonal voices, "The Wanderer" is dialogic in another way. Like many Stevie Smith works, the poem is a parody and thus constitutes a response to its didactic model by Isaac Watts, which begins, '"Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, / 'You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again.'" We can discern Smith's distinctive way of reworking literary texts and traditions by pairing "The Wanderer" with Lewis Carroll's hilarious spoof of Watts's poem ("The Sluggard" is one of the works Alice is commanded to recite, which comes out "very queer indeed"): '"Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare, / 'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.'" Carroll mockingly deflates his model, while Smith lifts its language, blending phrasing stolen from Watts with motifs of the romantic ballad to create an unsettling and poignant portrait of the regressive outsider—someone to be viewed with sympathetic identification rather than simplistic moral judgment.

Clearly, Stevie Smith's work frequently resonates with echoes of other writers' "voices," as she herself noted in the blurb she wrote for her Selected Poems. The feminist potential of this device is particularly apparent in "Childe Rolandine," a poem whose title and first stanza flaunt Smith's remolding and feminizing of her models, The Song of Roland and Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came":

Dark was the day for Childe Rolandine the artist
When she went to work as a secretary-typist
And as she worked she sang this song
Against oppression and the rule of wrong[.]

Mixing words from the workaday office with the phrasing of heroic poetry, these lines introduce a female and common-life version of the manly soldier's ordeal. The female artist's "song / Against oppression" then further combines blandly stated working-class protest with allegory, especially recalling Blake's "A Poison Tree":

It is the privilege of the rich
To waste the time of the poor
To water with tears in secret
A tree that grows in secret.

Suggesting that "the wicked tree of hatred" increases through its "secret," hidden nature, Rolandine first prays that her thoughts will not "be spoken" but then reverses her position, adopting a Blake-like stance against self-repression: "But then she sang, Ah why not? tell all, speak, speak, / Silence is vanity, speak for the whole truth's sake." The secretary-artist (pictured at her typewriter in Smith's drawing) then "took the bugle and put it to her lips." But Smith replaces Roland's legendary battle summons and Childe Roland's defiant cry with Rolandine's philosophical explanation of personal sacrifice to "a Spirit" which "feeds on our tears." By parodying two preceding works which defined the heroism of men caught in hopeless situations, Smith establishes a contrasting sense of heroism among women and workers, in ordinary circumstances. And out of the female artist's conflict-filled acceptance of suffering and her commitment to speaking comes a work of art: "Childe Rolandine bowed her head and in the evening / Drew the picture of the spirit from heaven." Absorbing the voices of heroic poetry and allegory (Blake's as well as Browning's), Smith constructs her own allegory of female artistic creation, as a process in which art is engendered by oppression, or rather, by the struggle for articulation in oppressive conditions.

The multivoiced character of many Stevie Smith poems can thus arise from her emphasis on contending voices and her echoes of specific literary traditions and texts. A third source of polyphonic effects—the creation of a divided psyche—can be seen in "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock." Responding to Coleridge's famous preface to "Kubla Khan," Smith challenges his view of artistic creation as a dreamlike, nonvolitional inspiration, always impeded by mundane circumstances:

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

This poem denies Coleridge's view of the poetic text not only through explicit statement but also by formal means, through its conversational tone, wordy argument, imperfect rhymes (curse/house) and nonrhymes (wrong/wrong). Yet, although the poem directly addresses Coleridge's text, its dialogic character mainly derives from radical breaks in the speaker's voice, as Smith renders conflicting "thoughts" about her subject. Thus from the initial, mostly serious criticism, the poem moves into playful mockery: "May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock? / Why, Porson, didn't you know?" Lines describing this Porson's "Warlock" ancestry and his "cat named Flo" form a background of clowning against which Smith articulates an emotionally charged (though borderline comic) revision of Coleridge's concept:

I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,

Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

The sense of a psyche which is split, multiple, "mixed" (as Smith describes human beings in another context [Collected Poems]) emerges through devices which make this poem radically split-voiced: shifts in rhyme scheme and line length, mixed registers in diction (the use of "felicitate" with "throw it away," "benison" with "grumble"), echoes of liturgy and of Tennyson's garden scene in Maud. The poem's speaking voice also veers in relation to its audience, moving from criticism (of Coleridge) to defensiveness ("These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing"). The speaker portrayed through this shifting discourse responds to the person from Porlock in four distinct ways: (1) as Coleridge's scapegoat, evidence of a self-evasion that is "wrong"; (2) as a ridiculous fiction; (3) as a symbol for death, the ultimate and welcome interruption; and (4) as a dreaded, depressing subject. When the last stanzas move from the third position—Smith's oft-reiterated view of death—to the fourth, the poem gains its peculiar power, expressing complex, realistic reactions rather than a single-voiced stance.

Through strong shifts in language, form, and point of view, a lyric like "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock" can seem multivoiced and dialogic while lacking any formally marked voices. Bakhtin himself usually focuses on segments of texts which represent a single speaker's discourse (as in third-person narrative commentary or first-person monologue); for him the defining characteristic of dialogic art forms is that they present conflicting perspectives, even if an opposing outlook is only suggested obliquely, as in cases involving parody or irony. Smith's "Bereavement" offers a potent illustration of how a dramatized speaker may convey a poet's implied criticism, creating a tension (Bakhtin would say a "dialogue") between possible viewpoints:

Maria Holt
Was not the dolt
That people thought her.
Her face was full
Her mind not dull
She was my daughter.
She had so much to do so very much
And used to shuffle round upon a crutch,
The younger children always called her mother,
And so she was to sister and to brother
Poor wretch she's dead and now I am bereft
Of £60 each year to fill the place she left
I never paid a cent before; it is too bad,
It's worse to lose a lass than lose a lad.

Moving from defense to eulogy of the hard-working, motherly daughter, the first eleven lines of the bereaved parent's discourse seem to fall into sentimental cliché, deflated by comic rhymes: Holt/dolt, thought her/daughter. The pathos of lines 7-10 is further undermined by devices which distance the parent and child, such as use of the daughter's full name and the delay (until line 6) in establishing their relationship. Yet the poem's departure from a conventional elegy only fully emerges in the last three lines, which transfer the speaker's statements from the context of an emotional eulogy into a purely monetary framework. The poem pivots on the word "bereft," a "double-voiced" expression (in Bakhtin's terms) which suggests, for a brief moment, the expected emotional loss, before the speaker's utilitarian meaning comes out. The poem's final lines reframe the speaker's discourse, so that appreciation of the overworked daughter must be reread as referring to the utility (rather than close emotional ties) that would make "a lass" harder to lose than "a lad." The heartfelt, if comically sentimental, elegy which the reader has been led to expect continues to function as a submerged voice, underscoring the speaker's purely economic view, in which the loss of a daughter can be calculated in pounds. Treating both perspectives with irony, Smith satirizes ways in which a virtuous woman's worth might be reckoned and her exploitation justified.

But the multivoiced character of Smith's dramatized lyrics does not always depend on implied criticism or irony, as we can see in "Widowhood or The Home-Coming of Lady Ross," a contrastingly sympathetic depiction of a bereaved character. Though technically a monologue, the poem begins with a series of voices, including several quotations, showing how Lady Ross's thoughts are permeated by the words of other people: her father, "the General," who complained, "Nobody hears me, nobody sees me"; young women at fashionable hotels at Baden and Cheltenham, who comment unmercifully on her aged appearance; and her deceased husband, Harold, who "loved" the very hotels which she associates with painfully unflattering remarks, repeatedly overheard. (The girl in Baden is quoted in German, thus enhancing the sense of polyphony, of distinct voices which haunt Lady Ross.) Contemplating painful experiences in fashionable society, Lady Ross initially seems crushed by others' ways of perceiving her, and she thinks, with revealing visual emphasis, "I am glad Harold is not here / To see me now." Yet as she sifts through others' views, she begins to define her own contrasting stance, stressing her happiness now in living "alone by the sea." Feeling guilt for this happiness, gained through her husband's death, she addresses him, citing and responding to his statement about her family not being "much good in company":

That's what you used to say, dear, do you remember, when I stayed in my room
In the hotel at Baden, or wherever it might be, Up you would come
Rushing, and kiss me and cry: Rhoda, your family,
I must say, are not much good in company.

Lady Ross's memory of Harold, filled with a sense of quick movement and excitement, suggests the fascination he had for her. And the hold he has had upon her thinking emerges in the repetition of his words about not being "good in company," a phrase which reflects not only her sense of failure but also his value system, defining normality in terms of a stylish social life. Yet in the poem's closing lines, Lady Ross moves beyond her preceding focus on others' evaluations (which stressed her inadequacy or faulty appearance), expressing instead her sense of home, her focus on its beauty: "Oh Harold, our house looks so beautiful today, / Why did you always want to go away?" Widowhood is indeed Lady Ross's "homecoming"—a chance to come to values more her own—and yet this process of separating herself from others' ways of seeing occurs through continued dialogue. Lady Ross's internal monologue is strikingly characterized by her dialogic relationship with voices from the past, and she can achieve self-definition only by contending with others' words, with their implied assumptions and values.

"Widowhood" illustrates how a Stevie Smith monologue can incorporate several voices and viewpoints, exploring values held within a specific social group. Her narrative poems often achieve this same effect. Smith's use of specific social idioms to present ways of seeing is particularly powerful in "Angel Boley," since characters within the narrative find words to express their sense of its crucial events. The poem defamiliarizes a tragically familiar story of child molestation and murder, based on an actual 1966 case known as the "Moors Murders." The Grimm-like first stanza displays crucial strategies of Smith's storytelling:

There was a wicked woman called Malady Festing
Who lived with her son-in-law, Hark Boley,
And her daughter Angel,
In a house on the high moorlands
Of the West Riding of Yorkshire
In the middle of the last century.

Several devices invest the story with an archiac and archetypal quality: the formulaic, fairy-tale opening; the removed temporal setting; the characters' nonnaturalistic, evocative names; and the parallels to "Hansel and Gretel," which emerge as Malady Festing (sickening feast, sickness infesting) tells Hark, "it is time / To take another couple of children / Into our kitchen." Angel, who is merely employed about the witch's house, has wrapped herself "in a dream of absentmindedness," and the poem highlights the heroine's awakening to her role as Gretel—or, as Jan Montefiore says, her "assumption of responsibility in the words that will forever after define her identity":

Angel wandered into the woods and she said: No more children
Are going to be murdered, and before they are murdered, tormented
And corrupted; no more children are going to be the victims
Of Mother Lure and my husband, Hark. Dark was the look then
On Angel's face, and she said: I am the Angel of Death.

After a brief narration of Angel's decisive actions—she feeds Malady and Hark soup made with a toxic mushroom, sometimes called "the Destroying Angel"—the narrative foregrounds not only her repeated self-definition, "I am the Angel of Death," but also her self-justification, stated to the police: "I have done evil, but I have saved many children." When Angel is placed in an asylum and dies, the villagers adapt her words for her tombstone's inscription: "She did evil that good / Might come." Though the Vicar dissents and has the words removed two times, they reappear, even when the grave is watched, "So the Vicar said: It is the hand of the Lord."

The poem leaves little doubt that the superstitious and religious villagers will interpret the ghostly reinscription as a miracle and as divine sanction for Angel's way of seeing herself and her actions. Yet although the narrative reiterates the protagonist's self-definition, the narrator's last words, "May God be merciful," distance the teller from Smith, whose complex critique of Christianity does not tally with this traditional formula. The poem thus employs a narrator whose unsophisticated, religious perspective resembles that of the participants within the story. Introducing "Angel Boley," Smith states, "It presents its problems in the words the villagers have chosen—with unerring instinct from Angel's own words—to write on her own tombstone." This professed attempt to render an event through the protagonist's "own words," adopted and sanctioned by other characters and the narrator, suggests Smith's interest in creating voices which represent ideological perspectives distinct from her own.

With a writer who focuses so much attention on voices, articulation, and communication, it is hardly surprising to find an attraction to dialogue poems, a preference Hermione Lee notes in Smith. Her conversations, debates, and even exchanges of letters (see Collected Poems) highlight contending outlooks, which are often left in a state of unresolved opposition, a device apparent in "Mother, among the Dustbins," "The Queen and the Young Princess," and "A Dream of Comparison" (the lastnamed assigns opposing assessments of life to Eve and Mary, then simply concludes with the words, "the difference between them was radical"). In "Was He Married?"—a theological poem exploring the nature of Jesus and of humanity—two speakers seem at first the knower and the learner, but the apparently younger, more innocent speaker makes some of the poem's strongest assertions, changing catechism into dialectic. Sometimes Smith splits differing viewpoints into paired poems, as with "An Agnostic," which is paired with "A Religious Man," and "Avondale," which is followed by the darker "Avondall." Her most curious linking of poems emerges in "How do you see?" which incorporates, virtually verbatim, an earlier forty-line poem, "Oh Christianity, Christianity"; the earlier lines become the "cry" of "a child of Europe," heard by the later poem's speaker. Like so many of Smith's works, "How do you see?" underscores ways of seeing yet shuns imagery of sight or revision, deploying instead a focus on voices and hearing.

Benefits reaped through this strategy are highlighted in an especially fine dialogue poem, "In the Park." Recounting a conversation overheard, the narrator describes "two silvered gentlemen" walking "by the silver lake," whose black midsection may represent the difference of understanding separating the men, displayed by their first speeches:

"Pray for the Mute who have no word to say,"
Cried the one old gentleman, "Not because they are dumb,

But they are weak. And the weak thoughts beating in the brain
Generate a sort of heat, yet cannot speak.
Thoughts that are bound without sound
In the tomb of the brain's room, wound. Pray for the Mute."
"But" (said his friend), "see how they swim
Free in the element best loved, so wet; yet breathe
As a visitor to the air come; plunge then, rejoicing more,
Having left it briefly for the visited shore, to come
Home to the wet
Windings that are yet
Best loved though familiar; and oh so right the wet
Stream and the wave; he is their pet."

Marked by ambiguity, these stanzas raise the question of whether "wound" should be read as a past participle, rhyming with "bound" and "sound" and continuing the imagery of binding, or be taken as a verb, one which half rhymes with "tomb" and "room," indicating that such unspoken thoughts inflict pain. In addition, the next stanza includes the confusing pronoun reference of "he is their pet," a phrase which seems calculated to puzzle the reader, since "the Mute" have been described in the plural until the simile "As a visitor" is used, after which the speaker provides no clarifying plural or singular pronouns.

Smith takes these possible confusions further in the poem's next stanzas, revealing the two men's crucial misunderstanding. The second, "mild" speaker is described as removing "his well-tuned hearing instrument" (Smith's drawing underscores this irony, since the hearing device is shown as the old-fashioned, horn-shaped type); this man's "heart / Barked with delight to stress / So much another's happiness." Yet the poem queries, "But which other's?" and shows the first, "sombre" gentleman "Mousing for pain," repeating his cry, "Pray for the Mute." At this point, the other "Upends his hearing instrument" and realizes his mistake: "Pray for the Mute'? / I thought you said the newt."

This delightful miscommunication raises questions about the power of speech, complicating the possible views on muteness which Smith teasingly suggests. Yet the poem's final stanzas add a further twist, by first asking which of the two men is "Christianer" and then dropping the question abruptly:

But wait; the first speaker now, the old sombre one,
Is penetrated quite by his friend's sun
And, "Oh blessed you," he cries, "to show
So in simplicity what is true."

The formerly gloomy gentleman then "sings a happy song, / Happier even than his friend's song was, righting the wrong," and this "song" presents a revised command, to "Praise … Not pray," since "Praise is the best prayer, the least / self's there, that least's release." About this concluding song—the words of one man who is influenced by another—the poem's narrator states that "two, better than one, finally strike truth in his happy song." The poem thus emphasizes the value of dialogue and dialogic understanding, reinforcing this idea through the narrator's spontaneous revision ("But wait"), a shift from evaluating the superior position ("which is Christianer") to merging the two speakers' insights. And the deaf man's description of the newt, though mistakenly supplied, works well as an image of mute humans, at home in the fluid, nonverbal element, though they can visit (in understanding) the world of air, of speech. The enviable, "cool amphibian" is surely not pitied within this leveling poem, which shows one human speaker whose "heart / Barked with delight" while another was "Mousing for pain." Balancing "the Mute" with flawed speakers and flaunting one's hearing aid, "In the Park" suggests the fragility of human communication, even while it also shows a movement toward less "self through speaking and contending.

The persistence and subtlety with which Smith explores these ideas can be glimpsed by comparing "In the Park" with "The Abominable Lake," published nearly two decades earlier. The antecedent poem presents a lyric speaker's response to the dark lake in which "a world lies drowned," a "silent world" that is "beyond the dominion of Time, / Beyond the soft sensual touch of the seasonal flow." The speaker pities this world that is removed from change, from life, and (with Smith's typical stress) from speech: "Poor world, my heart breaks for your sealed inarticulate woe, / And the tears that are frozen in yours melt to flood in my eyes." Striking similarities connect this weeper (who notes her own "sensitive heart") to the lamenting gentleman of "In the Park." Both cry for those who cannot speak and associate such a state with constriction, stasis, death. While both are treated with irony and are shown to revise their views, Smith's work is replete with poems linking the inarticulate with woe. One such poem, "King Hamlet's Ghost," offers a blank-verse meditation on the Shakespearean phrase "It would be spoke to." In an utterance that in itself constitutes a symbolic gesture, the speaker of Smith's poem addresses the dead king while also making him the representative of "All those who go / In midnight fields of melancholy thought / Where friends pass distantly and do not speak":

Thou wouldst be spoke to, for unless one speaks
Thou canst not; must be spoke to then or go
Unheard, uncomforted to Misery.

To be trapped in "melancholy thought," to experience "sealed inarticulate woe," to be the drowning person whom "nobody heard"—these are Stevie Smith's recurring images for alienated states of humanity which are akin to death or the nonhuman because a vital element of responsiveness, an I-thou relationship, is lacking. Yet her poems explore a range of views on speech and silence, from exhortations to "tell all, speak, speak" ("Childe Rolandine") to defenses of silence ("The White Thought," "The Poets Are Silent") and poems stressing how speech can be trivialized ("La Speakerine de Putney") or hazardous ("Heber," "The Word"). While Smith urges that the solitary "must be spoke to," she writes with equal eloquence of the desire to escape speech, escape relationship. One of her last poems, "Oblivion," thus virtually reverses "Not Waving but Drowning," showing a deliberate movement toward death by water—individual dissolution—arrested by correct interpretation of cries from the shore, reasserting relationship:

It was a human face in my oblivion
A human being and a human voice
That cried to me, Come back, come back, come back.
But I would not, I said I would not come back.

Oblivion is, for Smith's speaker, ultimately alluring, "sweet" (a word occurring five times in the poem), "a sweet mist," "a sweet and milky sea, knee deep, / … [and] growing deeper." Yet the speaker returns (as the Wanderer cannot) because of the repeated calling of a "voice": "It was a human and related voice / That cried to me in Pain. So I turned back." This poem exemplifies Stevie Smith's characteristic emphasis on "related" voices, while it also explicitly equates being human with being inextricably tied to another person who is (in a telling synecdoche) "a human and related voice." Associating the voice with "pain," "Oblivion" conveys, with consummate ambivalence, the power of speech to relate and to define, to effect ties and boundaries, to make one human—a cliché Smith revitalizes by evoking such reluctance at the prospect.

This ambivalence toward the "human voice" recalls similarly balanced works, "The Wanderer" and "In the Park." These poems, along with Smith's canon taken as a whole, suggest a highly complex apprehension of articulation and communication. While fundamentally connected with being vital and fully human, speech is, for Smith, both limited and limiting. Though the reader may be attracted to one of her positions—"tell all, speak, speak" or "two, better than one, finally strike truth"—her work engages us in considering many quite odd viewpoints, like the possible desirability of oblivion, muteness, or being outside of relationships, "where there are no doors and no windows at all." Rather than seeing Stevie Smith in terms of one voice or view, we can instead admire the subtlety and artistry of her representations of voices, which can heighten our sense of the powers and limits of human speech.