Contributions to almighty truth: Stevie Smith's seditious romanticism

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by James Najarian

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      Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood,
      They lisped in accents mild,
      But when I asked them to explain
      They grew a little wild.
      How do you know your Bog is dood
      My darling little child?

      We know because we wish it so
      That is enough, they cried,
      And straight within each infant eye
      Stood up the flame of pride,
      And if you do not think it so
      You shall be crucified.

      Then tell me, darling little ones
      What's dood, suppose Bog is?
      Just what we think, the answer came,
      Just what we think it is.
      They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours
      And we are wholly his.

      But when they raised them up again
      They had forgotten me
      Each one upon each other glared
      In pride and misery
      For what was dood, and what their Bog
      They never could agree.

      Oh sweet it was to leave them then,
      And sweeter not to see,
      And sweetest of all to walk alone
      Beside the encroaching sea,
      The sea that soon should drown them all,
      That never yet drowned me. (265)

It is tempting to catalog the echoes that Smith exploits in this poem--of the Bible in "pride and misery," of the Anglican liturgy in "Our Bog is ours," and of Lear and Carroll in the intelligible nonsensical line "Our Bog is Dood." The poem mocks the children's (or child-like adults'--it is never clear) strong belief in nothing that they can define, and their willingness to defend their belief with violence, first against the speaker and then against each other. Smith cleverly interweaves romantic stances in her poem. Once again this is a dialogue poem like "We Are Seven," with Smith questioning these indeterminate children rather than a single child. But here their childhood is not a desirable state. Their innocence is willful ignorance, and not closer to a desirable "natural" knowledge or "natural piety." No sooner do they demonstrate their piety by bowing their heads to the vague deity than they turn upon each other (and forget they were in a conversation with the speaker). Smith even revises the individual words of Wordsworth's poem. The child in Wordsworth's poem is "wildly clad": her ragged clothing--or the equation of her ragged clothing with some desirable natural state--soon becomes part of the "beauty" that makes the speaker "glad." Smith's children are "rather wild," meaning naughty or spoiled, at any rate unappealing. "Wild" no longer has any "natural" cachet.

When the children turn away from the speaker to attack one another Smith seems to drop the subject of Christian belief, as the "darlings" have already indicted themselves. Her final stanza has her walking along the shore, proclaiming her freedom from the whole subject. This stroll along the ocean references that Victorian writer perhaps most concerned with both his romantic and his Christian inheritances, Matthew Arnold. Arnold's effete, sorrowful speakers range along the beach as they make their most significant utterances. (Patmore's speaker in his "Magna Est Veritas" is also strolling beside the sea, which is also meaningless: a "purposeless, glad ocean" [369].) That sea reminds Arnold's speakers of their isolation from other people and from faith's traditions: in "To Marguerite--Continued" the speaker ends viewing "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea" (131). In "Dover Beach" the sea is explicitly an emblem of the faith whose decline Arnold mourns:

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Contributions to almighty truth: Stevie Smith's seditious romanticism

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by James Najarian

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