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STEVIE SMITH c 1960
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A MOTHER'S HEARSE
The love of a mother for her child
Is not necessarily a beautiful thing
It can be compounded of pride and show
And exalt the self above every thing.
Oh why is that child so spoilt and horrible?
His mother has never neglected the trouble
Of giving him his will at every turn
And that is why his eyes do burn.
His eyes do burn with a hungry fire
His fingers clutch at the air and do not tire
He is a persecuting force
And as he grows older he grows worse.
And for his sake the friends are put down
And the happy people do not come round,
In pride and hostility against the world
This family upon itself is now curled.
Oh wretched they and wretched the friend
And this will continue without end
And all for a mother's love it was,
I say it were better a mother's hearse.
Harold's Leap
(1950)
Florence Margaret Smith, who was nicknamed 'Stevie' by a friend in honour of a jockey who had been famous in their youth, was born on 20 September 1902 in the English town of Kingston-upon-Hull. Her parents' marriage was not a happy one and her father Charles abandoned the family shortly after the failure of his shipping business, an enterprise he had inherited from his own father. He ran away to sea and was rarely seen afterwards by Smith or her elder sister Molly, his most frequent means of communication with his daughters being brief postcards in which he would tell them what port he was next bound for.
In 1905 Smith's mother Ethel moved the family to a house in North London that would remain the poet's home — except for a three year stint in a tuberculosis sanitorium between the ages of five and eight that initiated her lifelong fascination with death — until her own death from a brain tumour on 7 March 1971. After her mother became ill, Smith and her sister were cared for by their maternal aunt Madge Spear. A fiercely independent feminist who eschewed the company of men, Spear became the formative influence on her niece's character and outlook, an influence which considerably deepened following the death of Ethel Smith in 1921.
After completing her education at the North London Collegiate School for Girls, Smith found a position as private secretary to publisher Sir Neville Pearson, a job she would retain for thirty years and only leave after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1953. By then she had already published five volumes of idiosyncratic and darkly humorous poetry as well as the experimental novels Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938) and The Holiday (1949). Her most popular poem Not Waving, Drowning appeared in 1957 as part of the collection A Good Time Was Had By All, a phrase which soon entered the English language and remains in common use today.
Although she lived a semi-reclusive, mostly celibate life with her aunt and never married, Smith had a wide range of friends in the arts and was increasingly noticed and praised by the critics. Fellow poet Sylvia Plath described herself as '…a desperate Smith-addict' and expressed interest in meeting her, a meeting that never took place before Plath took her own life in 1962. Smith herself went on to publish three more volumes of poetry before her own death, with her final volume Scorpion and Other Poems appearing posthumously in 1972.
Use the link below to read more poems by British poet STEVIE SMITH (1902–1971):
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