Stevie Smith and Her Dancing Girls

Abstract

What constitutes a good Stevie Smith poem? The question bothered the author herself and it can bedevil the reader too, with evaluative quandaries often compounding interpretative ones. Smith's uncertainty about the relative merits of her poems informed publication decisions, and this in turn has resulted in certain compositions being overlooked in critical assessments of her achievement. This article takes as a test-case example a hitherto largely neglected poem, ‘The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’, and through sustained close reading makes the case that the poem, unpublished in Smith's lifetime, may be one of her finest pieces. Through an analysis of the poem's cultural and historical context, its manifold ambiguities, its imagery and atmosphere, its coded engagement with the fabular and the strange effects achieved through rhythm and rhyme, the poem is shown to offer a complex, psychologically suggestive response to issues which exercise Smith in many of her poems, including the tension between innocence and knowledge, between the child and the adult, between the capricious and the calculated, and between the ‘frivolous’ and the ‘ominous’. The difficulty of determining how ironically and how seriously Smith engages with some of the latent preoccupations of her poem, such as the power of sorcery and the supernatural, the growth of sexual awareness in young girls and (possibly) the approach of the Second World War, is taken as symptomatic of the tendency of Smith's poems to at once invite and defy exegesis. Taken together, these various concerns and characteristics provide the grounds for considering one of Smith's overlooked poems as one of her most effective. Yet the conclusion seeks to complicate this assessment by cross-questioning the criteria by which Smith's ‘success’ as a poet may be determined.

Keywords:

• Stevie Smith
• poetry
• fairy tale
• legend
• enchantment
• school
• girl
• princess
• dance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rachel Marshall was a music, speech and drama teacher in Cambridge and advised Smith about her delivery for radio broadcasts (Spalding 1988: 140, 231).

2 See ‘Acknowledgments and Bibliographical Note’ in Smith 1981. ‘The Ballet of the Twelve Dancing Princesses’ was not included in Smith 1983, which contains other works that were first published in Smith 1981. The poem was, however, one of thirteen chosen to represent Smith in Dowson 1996: 145–6.

3 For an account of Woolf's talk at Hayes Court, see also Lee 1997: 563–4.

4 See also Kerr 2002: 108–9 on Hayes Court as ‘a society school’ and on a ‘school production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by the young Alec Guinness’.

5 Rachel's daughter Kitty Hermges (née Marshall), who went on to become a documentary film-maker, and who brought the poem to light after Smith's and her own mother's deaths, was herself a pupil at Hayes Court School from 1926 to 1932.

6 I am grateful to Dr Judith Woolf (University of York) for her thoughts, in correspondence and conversation, on the girls’ manner of dancing and for alerting me to the works of Goyder and Kerr referenced in this article.

7 On the importance of the Brothers Grimm to Smith's creative imagination, see Spalding 1988: 21, 90–91; Orr 1966: 226; Williams 1991: 42.

8 For a markedly different poetic response to the legend, see Sexton 2001: 87–92.

9 Email to author, 29 July 2016.

10 Compare Bedient 1974: 150 on how, in Smith's poetic responses to fables, ‘cleverness and innocence, narrative and rapt stasis, are curiously and winningly combined’.