Away+Melancholy

In this page I explore some of Stevie Smith’s religious beliefs and some of her poems which touch on religion. God was always important to Stevie: when she was young she belonged to the Anglican Church and she recognised //‘a cheerfulness and courage in the church community, and modesty in doing good, s//he wanted to believe in a loving God, but she came to the conclusion that it was morally right and necessary to reject Christianity. Her religious poems reflect the tension between her desire to believe in the Christian God and her belief that Christianity was seriously flawed. Stevie explores the Christian religion with an intensity which is unusual in the multicultural and generally secular society of the UK today. However in the interval between the two world wars many other writers were also preoccupied with religion. Some, including Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh, and T S Eliot, started off as strongly agnostic and then converted to the Catholic Church. As Stevie put it, //‘ there was what might be called a stampede of the sensitive and the intellectual person away from the vulgarities of the secular world into the Catholic Church//.’ George Orwell, (in the essay Notes on Nationalism) wrote in 1941 that in the 20’s and 30’s //‘political Catholicism//' was in the place that Communism occupied in 1941. I think this can be interpreted as meaning that political Catholicism was a militant ideology espoused by a number of intellectuals. A number of other writers, C S Lewis and WH Auden were devout members of the Protestant church. In her childhood Stevie loved the ceremonies of the church; psalms and hymns are often echoed in her poems. After her mother’s death when Stevie was sixteen, Stevie and her sister Molly were introduced to the Roman Catholic Church by a relative. Aunt disapproved strongly but in spite of this Molly joined the Catholic church a few years later. Molly wrote that //‘Rome seems so safe... I’m sure we need on head on earth and that the Pope is he.’// Stevie gradually became less certain, and eventually agnostic, but she always remained a religious agnostic. Barbera and McBrien (**Stevie** p 241) quote a reviewer of Stevie’s //**‘Selected Poems’**// who noted: //‘Stevie Smith is an avowed agnostic, but these are religious poems.’// I’ll look at a few of Stevie’s many religious poems. To begin here is //**Egocentric**//, (Collected Poems p 18 ) which begins by asking:
 * Stevie and God **

//What care I if good God be/ If he be not good to me If he will not hear my cry/ Nor heed my melancholy midnight sigh//

//‘What care I// ‘ is repeated throughout, as she talks about how God created the lamb, and golden lion, and mud delighting clam, and tiger stepping out on padded toe, the ruby orbed pelican. There follow the sun and moon and stars, the infant owl and the baboon, and then

//He made all silent inhumanity/ Nescient and quiescent to his will/ Unquickened by the questing conscious flame /That is my glory and my bitter bane.//

She ends with more things not to care about.

//What care I if skies are blue/ If God created gnat and gnu / What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me?//

It is obviously absurd to expect God to have created the universe to satisfy any one individual’s desires, and she makes this idea sound ridiculous. Even so, it’s an idea which is often in the back of people’s minds when they talk of the goodness of God. If it’s thought reasonable to thank God when someone recovers from illness, escapes from harm, or wins a battle, then it seems reasonable to feel angry with God when he does not save us from failure, pain and sadness. Stevie's poem shows up the absurdity of this, and her downbeat rejection of God’s goodness (//what care I)// is counter pointed by the playful way in which she itemises God’s creation: the ‘//mud delighting clam’// and ‘//gnat and gnu’//. Her delight in the world is balanced against the melancholy, which is related to //... the questing conscious flame/ That is my glory and my bitter bane//. The next poem I will consider has melancholy as its theme: //**Away Melancholy**// (//Collected Poems// p 328 ).

//Away melancholy/ Away with it let it go. Are not the trees green, /The earth as green? Does not the wind blow, /Fire leap and rivers flow?//

As in the last poem, she gives us images of life, discusses the busy ant and all things that hurry to eat or be eaten, and then moves on to the human ...

//Man too hurries, /Eats, couples, buries /He is an animal also/ With a hey ho melancholy, /Away with it let it go//

She goes on to say that man is superlative as he of all creatures raises a stone and

Into the stone the god /Pours what he knows of good ... Speak not to me of tears/ Tyranny, pox, wars, /Saying, Can God /Stone of man’s thought, be good?

’The image of the stone calls up Matthew 7 v.9 //‘Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone.’// The poem also reminds me of Neitzsche’s question //‘ Is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?// Stevie continues:

Say it is rather enough/That the stuffed/ Stone of man’s good, growing/ By man’s called God. /Away melancholy, let it go.

She affirms that it’s something that man has an idea of good which he venerates. She goes on to say that man aspires to good, to love, and that even when he is beaten, corrupted, dying, he -

//heaves an eye above/ Cries Love, love. /It is his virtue needs explaining, /Not his failing//.

This poem is full of doubt but is also, I feel, a brave attempt to face doubt without shrinking, to come to terms with the idea that God may well be a human construct, and to celebrate humanity in spite of the tears, tyranny, pox and wars that are part of human condition. Michael Tatham, ( **In Search of Stevie Smith** p134) writes that //'Stevie Smith’s remarkable achievement as a poet was to sustain a dialogue with God in which there was no pretence that a comfortable response was possible'..

-from// http://www.strange-attractor.co.uk/stevirel.htm