Deeply Morbid

Deeply Morbid

Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters
Always out of office hours running with her social betters
But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her
Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her
It was that look within her eye
Why did it always seem to say goodbye?

Joan her name was and at lunchtime
Solitary solitary
She would go and watch the pictures In the National Gallery
All alone all alone
This time with no friend beside her
She would go and watch the pictures
All alone.

Will she leave her office colleagues
Will she leave her evening pleasures
Toil within a friendly bureau
Running later in her leisure?
All alone all alone
Before the pictures she seemed turned to stone.

Close upon the Turner pictures
Closer than a thought may go
Hangs her eye and all the colours
Leap into a special glow
All for her, all alone
All for her, all for Joan.

First the canvas where the ocean
Like a mighty animal
With a wicked motion
Leaps for sailors’ funeral

Holds her painting. Oh the creature
Oh the wicked virile thing
With its skin of fleck and shadow
Stretching tightening over him.
Wild yet caputured wild yet caputured
By the painter, Joan is quite enraptured.

Now she edges from the canvas
To another loved more dearly
Where the awful light of purest
Sunshine falls across the spray,
There the burning coasts of fancy
Open to her pleasure lay.
All alone all alone
Come away come away
All alone.

Lady Mary, Lady Kitty
The Honourable Featherstonehaugh
Polly Tommy from the office
Which of these shall hold her now?
Come away come away
All alone.

The spray reached out and sucked her in
It was hardly a noticed thing
That Joan was there and is not now
(Oh go and tell young Featherstonehaugh)
Gone away, gone away
All alone.

She stood up straight
The sun fell down
There was no more of London Town
She went upon the painted shore
And there she walks for ever more
Happy quite
Beaming bright
In a happy happy light
All alone.

They say she was a morbid girl, no doubt of it
And what befell her clearly grew out of it
But I say she’s a lucky one
To walk for ever in that sun
And as I bless sweet Turner’s name
I wish that I could do the same.

Stevie Smith

Author: Stevie Smith
Online Poetry at PoetryFeast.com

I have become a fan of Stevie Smith during this course. I think I might have to look at more of her work!

Stevie was raised by her aunt Madge who was a feminist with no patience for men. With her father abandoning the family to go off to see and her mother being ill, she grew up without male role models. After her bouts with tuberculosis, she became fascinated with death and says that the preoccupation with it started when she was seven. This preoccupation is seen throughout her poetry and her artwork.

I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting

D H Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence is best known as a novelist but his first-published works were poems. His poetry had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic. He created poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Filled with his views that were radical for his time, his poems contained bitter satire and sexuality that expressed his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon society. He regarded sex and nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern industrialized society. His work was seen as controversial and he was often involved in censorship cases. The most widely publicized of which was his novel "Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928).

 

 Due to his problems with censorship, Lawrence self-published "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the help of Florentine bookseller Giuseppe Orioli. With more than 1000 copies selling for 2 guineas each, the book was a success. Since it had not been copyrighted, pirates soon began to cut into the profits with black market copies. It has been said that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" won the half century fight for sexual liberation in English writing.  His wife, Frieda, wrote that he tried to raise sex from a mere animal function to a truly human all-embracing activity.

 

 Facing troubles with censorship and the supposed pro-German sympathies of his wife, Frieda Von Richthofen a cousin of the infamous Red Baron Von Richthofen, during World War 1, Lawrence traveled the world looking for a place to call home. His travels took him to Italy, Germany, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the French Riviera, Mexico and the United States. His time in Taos, New Mexico is where he became the center of a group of female admirers who considered themselves his disciples and their quarrels for his attention became literary legend.

 

As a writer of some of literatures most sensual stories and poems, Lawrence did not support pornography.

"But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously... you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit." According to Lawrence, the common man degrades sex and has "as great a hate and contempt of sex as the greyest Puritan... they have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust."