Stevie Smith and God

In this page I explore some of Stevie Smiths 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 recogniseda cheerfulness and courage in the church community, and modesty in doing good, she 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 20s and 30spolitical 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 mothers 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 thatRome seems so safe... Im 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 (Steviep 241) quote a reviewer of SteviesSelected Poemswho noted:Stevie Smith is an avowed agnostic, but these are religious poems.Ill look at a few of Stevies many religious poems. To begin here isEgocentric, (Collected Poems p 18 ) which begins by asking:What care I if good God be/ If he be not good to meIf he will not hear my cry/ Nor heed my melancholy midnight sighWhat 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 thenHe 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 individuals desires, and she makes this idea sound ridiculous. Even so, its an idea which is often in the back of peoples minds when they talk of the goodness of God. If its 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 Gods goodness (what care I)is counter pointed by the playful way in which she itemises Gods creation: the mud delighting clamand 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 Poemsp 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 goShe goes on to say that man is superlative as he of all creatures raises a stone andInto the stone the god /Pours what he knows of good ...Speak not to me of tears/ Tyranny, pox, wars, /Saying, Can God /Stone of mans thought, be good?The image of the stone calls up Matthew 7 v.9Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone.The poem also reminds meofNeitzsches 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 mans good, growing/ By mans called God. /Away melancholy, let it go.She affirms that its 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 Smithp134) writes that'Stevie Smiths remarkable achievement as a poet was to sustain a dialogue with God in which there was no pretence that a comfortable response was possible'..InWas He Married, (p389) Stevie explores the difficulty of the concept of Christ as God. Its in the form of a dialogue between two people, one asking questions about Jesus, and the other answering.Was he married, did he try / To support as he grew less fond of them / Wife and family?to which the answer is of course no he did not. When the questioner learns that Christ did not suffer from various other common irritations of life as a human, he says:All human beings should have a medalA God cannot carry it , he is not ableA god is Mans doll, you assHe makes him up like this on purpose.He might have made him up worse.He often has in the past.To choose a god of love, as he did and doesIs a little move then?Yes it is.A larger one will be when menLove love and hate hate but do not deify themIt will be a larger one.Stevie, in this poem, is deeply sceptical of the divinity of Christ, feeling that to be human and divine is a contradiction in terms;she also thinks it a mistake to personify and deify love and good but she approves of Christs message of love. The lovely poemThe Airy Christ(p 345) simply admires Christ as depicted in St Marks Gospel: Stevie sees him as a singer, who only wants people to listen to his song,'he does not wish that men should love him more than any thing/ because he died'.The God-like leader or hero is an ancient idea, Greek heroes attained divinity, Kings in the middle ages ruled by divine right , and the idea is still alive in the idea of the Pope. The glorification of a leader can strengthen the state, but leaders who believe in their superiority commonly abuse their power. In her notebooks (quoted in Barbera and McBrien 's biographySteviep 46) Stevie wrote :Where there is humour, there will be no Lenin, no Mussolini, and perhaps Christ will be crowded out'.But, Stevie continues, isnt a sense of humourworth morethan these? This sounds a strange reckoning of worth, but I think Stevie is right, humour is a good defence against the dangers of authoritative leaders: a person who knows he can be absurd will not have the delusion that he is always right, and a person who knows his leader can be absurd will not follow him into grotesque cruelties perpetrated by the followers of Hitler, or into the bloody slaughter of the Crusades.The belief in hell was also an aspect of Christianity that disgusted Stevie. ( This is something she has in common with Charles Darwin, whosebiographyalso appears in this site.) The poemThoughts About the Christian Doctrine of Eternal Hell( p387) makes her position clear:The religion of Christianity/ Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty/ Reject this sweetness, for she wears / A smoky dress out of hell fires.Writing in 1968 of the Inquisition in an essaySome Impediments to Christian Commitment'(Me Againp 158)Stevie suggests that this torture was not something that a honest Christian can separate himself from, it was inherent in Christianity:For the worst cruelties of man end with death, but hell is eternal, and Christ made himself the King of Hell and judge of torments. So ... I threw away the sweetness of Christianity and remembered the harsh bones , and said, it is immoral.This unequivocal position was not one that she kept to, admitting in this same essay that later her position becametinged with uncertainty.She also wrote for Gemini magazine in 1958 ( quoted inStevie Smithby Frances Spalding p 235 ) an essay on The Necessity of Not Believing'. Here she makes it clear that she did not find it easy to be a non believer: The path of an unbeliever, especially if he is an unbeliever with a religious temperament, is fraught with the perils of flatness and ennui, and religion, by contrast, particularly the Christian religion, is so dramatic and exciting, with its hazards of eternal life and eternal damnation, its demonic urge to boss, confine and intimidate, and above all its sweet promise of a heavenly father, oh how sweet that can be, this sweet interest that never fails, even if it damn us.However she also wrote that she did not find the world of uncertaintya cruel place: there is room in it for love, joy, virtue, affection, and room too for imagination.The long poemHow do you see(p 516) she explores her doubts fully. This aroused great controversy at the time. It was commissioned by the Guardian newspaper and published in Whitsun 1964. All the next Saturdays letter page was given over to responses to it. Stevie herself was inundated with mail for weeks afterwards, congratulating her, abusing her or trying to convert her.How Do You Seeis not one of her better poems, it's rather prosaic in parts, but inGod the Eater(p339) I feel that Stevie has written a fantastic poem which achieves a synthesis between her unbelief and her belief. Here is the start of the poem:There is a god in whom I do not believeYet to this god my love stretches,This god whom I do not believe in isMy whole life, my life and I am his.Seamus Heaney (In Search of Stevie Smithp 213) writes that he poems miss the absolute intensity required of Emily Dickinsons definition (If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry): when you read them, you dont feel that the top of your head has been taken off.I woulddisagree with Heaney, when I heardGod the Eaterread in Palmers Green Church for the Stevie Smith Centenary I certainly felt the intensity of the poem blasting through the top of my head.Why should Stevie Smiths writing on religion be important today? The need to understand the religious impulse is as important as ever today because religious hostilities are contributing to a literal blowing of the top of peoples heads off. Of course the religious beliefs are tarnished with the desire for power, but even so a belief in the rightness of ones own version of God, whether by terrorists or states, contributes to todays horrible records of death and destruction. Here is the last verse ofHowDo You See:I do not think we shall be able to bear much longer the dishonestyOf clinging for comfort to beliefs we do not believe in,For comfort, and to be comfortably free of the fearOf diminishing good, as if truth were a convenience.I think if we do not learn quickly, and learn to teach childrenTo be good without enchantment, without the helpOf beautiful painted fairy tales pretending to be true,,Then I think it will be too much for us, the dishonesty,And, armed as we are now, we shall kill everybody,It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody.It may weaken us if we believe that all our gods and leaders are as absurd as everyone elses, but if we recognise this we might have a less cruel and belligerent world.What is the future for Christianity? Here is a verse fromHow do you SeeOh Christianity, Christianity,That has grown kinder now, as in the political world,The colonial system grows kinder before it vanishes, are you vanishing?Is it not time for you to vanish?The question is obviously still open, but I think that our culture is developing in ways that don't owe much to Christianity, our perceptions of the world are changing as our understanding of the world, from the cosmic to the molecular, is growing. We are beginning to understand our deep connection with nature. Stevie was alive this issues also, as can be seen in her poems,Fafnir and the Knightsp332 In Protocreationp 284 andNoddingp 500.For me, the strongest reason to read and enjoy Stevies religious poems is that they are an honest record of her doubts but also of the importance of God to her. She does not say, as Lenin did, that religion is the opium of the people, or, as the scientific atheist Richard Dawkins does, that God does not exist. She felt that God was important, even though he might be onlya stone of mans thought, a repository for mans urge for goodness. She felt that the god in whom she did not believe washer whole life. She recognised the imperfections of Christianity, but felt To choose a god of love, ... Is a little move then. Michael Tatham, (In Search of Stevie Smithp146) writes:'Who can doubt that Stevie Smiths rare gift as a religious poet was not only to sing of disbelief as our common religious experience but to laugh self-mockingly at so much seriousness'.I'm impressed by Stevie's determination to look at life as it is, with all its absurdities, by her constant questioning and search for meaning, by her her refusal to accept Christianity even though it would have given comfort and meaning to her life, and her understanding of the importance of the religious impulse, the impossibility of denying it:There is a god in whom I do not believeYet to this god my love stretches ...