This is a Good Poem June 1st
It’s summer, let’s read Stevie Smith. This is my favorite poem about swimming. Except it’s not about swimming.
That’s Smith’s drawing there that’s almost always published with the poem. There’s a good short essay on her in the New Yorker, that tells you, among other things, that the publisher she worked for gave her early retirement with a full pension when she tried to kill him with scissors and then attempted suicide in the office. She’d spent thirty-three years in a publishing office, so it was understandable.
My second favorite poem of Smith’s is “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock.” The Person from Porlock is the guy who knocked on Coleridge’s door while he was writing “Kubla Khan.” Coleridge, instead of ignoring it, answered, and when he got back to the poem, couldn’t remember how he was going to end it so it remains unfinished to this day. I have always been suspicious of this; when I’m in a white heat of writing, you could break down my door with a two-by-four and I’d keep going. I think Coleridge was stuck. Every time I get stuck, I think about this verse and long for a person from Porlock:
I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,
But the longer poem is about more than writing, in fact, like the swimming poem, it isn’t about writing at all.
Thoughts about the Person from Porlock
BY STEVIE SMITH
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.
He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.
It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.
*
May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn’t you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go,
He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,
And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.
I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,
Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.
I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.
*
I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.
*
Why do they grumble so much?
He comes like a benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.
*
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
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