'A Very Deadly Sort of Slave Feeling'

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us. Death is impertinent. “Up and Down” appeared in her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937: “Up and down the street they go Tapping tapping to and fro What they see I do not know “Up and down the streets they hurry Push and rush and jerk and worry Full of ineffectual flurry Up and down the street they run From morning to the set of sun I shall be glad when they have done I shall be glad when there’s an end Of all the noise that doth offend My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.” The pair of spondees in the middle of the final line fall like clods of earth on a…