Diane Mehta praises the “death poems” of Stevie Smith, noting, “Any longing that might have gone to a man Smith instead projects onto death”:
If you’re a thinking, feeling poet, you’re going to wonder what the meaning of life is, and it might depress you a little. And if, like Smith, you start off with a religious feeling and then discard it, even if you keep the spiritual dialogue up—which she did, as a practicing Anglican—you’re going to run into some sort of spiritual chasm. (It was the same for Eliot and Auden, though they chose salvation while Smith, disillusioned, was deeply ambivalent about the existence of the afterlife.) On top of that, if you give up romantic intimacy and become an old maid, well, your longing will need to deposit itself somewhere over the course of a lifetime. So Smith longs for death. “Tender Only to One,” a kind of love letter, says it straight:
Tender only to one,
Last petal’s latest breath
Cries out aloud
From the icy shroud
His name, his name is Death.Centuries ago, “loving” death by way of exploration and religious feeling was much more in style. In a 1957 letter to Anna Kallin, a colleague at the BBC Radio, Smith explained that she was including a lecture, “The Necessity of Not Believing,” in which she showed how she was religious when young, then wasn’t at all, and then became “conscientiously anti-religious” because it was immoral to believe. Her description of the lecture is a sound description of Smith herself: “It is not at all whimsical, as some asses seem to think I am, but serious, yet not aggressive, & fairly cheerful though with melancholy patches.”
The Dish 