On This Day…Forgive Me, Forgive Me, Stevie Smith

 

Forgive me, forgive me

Forgive me forgive me for my heart is my own
And not to be given for any man's frown
Yet would I not keep it for ever alone.

Forgive me forgive me I thought that I loved
My fancy betrayed me my heart was unmoved
My fancy too often has carelessly roved.

Forgive me forgive me for here where I stand
There is no friend beside me no lover at hand
No footstep but mine in my desert of sand.

Stevie Smith

Best known for her lines: “I was much too far out all of my life/and not waving but drowning,” Stevie Smith died on March 7th in 1971.

She had been awarded the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969 but perhaps the sense of isolation in her poetry foreshadows the obscurity which would follow for her and few lists of influential English poets of the mid to late twentieth century include her name. Fellow poet, Jeni Couzyn remembers her, “standing in all of her loneliness as one standing on a great height.” Robert Graves also recognised her sense of isolation but said that she wrote “the purest poetry of our time.”

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

On February 11th, 1963 at thirty years of age, Sylvia Plath killed herself in a London flat.

She remains a complex, controversial literary figure but there is no doubt about the technical flair she shows in her poetry and her unsettling ability to project her insecurities into her work.

Mirror is an example of a popular writing class exercise: write from the point of view of an object in the room. But few could inject such an ominous feel in the mundane like Plath does here, "In me she has drowned a young girl,and in me an old woman/Rises toward her day after day," And her final simile, "like a terrible fish." is truly unsettling.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. 
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath