This is the first essay in a new series on Canadian Christian poets, by Burl Horniachek.
Kay Smith was a Canadian and Christian poet from New Brunswick. She was born in St. John and continued to live there for almost her entire life, working as a teacher. Though her life was centred locally in St. John, she was intensely interested in the broader, worldwide movement of modernism in poetry, and obviously read and was influenced by the works of her American and British contemporaries, including especially Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens and Bishop, as well as the contemporaneously published Hopkins.
Following Hopkins, many of her early poems explore those moments where the beauty and terror of nature reveal the grandeur of God. Though her poems in this mode are often beautiful and accomplished, one often feels like one is going over well-trodden ground and Smith does not always remake it sufficiently anew. A good example is “Night Sky”:
Stars burn in the midnight sky; They seem so near a hand outstretched From an upper window could pick them like fruit. In the ancient orchard the hard green apples Are hidden in leaves and the windless dark. The grass is zebra-striped by bold shadows of tree trunks. The familiar has become strange. As I float behind my eyes, The stars fall blazing through space, Down, down, down and are quenched in that nameless place Where I am faceless as the darkness, and all my limbs Dissolve in rhythms of that mystery On which the ark of my little life sails all night Toward dawn and resurrection.
However, Smith moves beyond that in her best work. As with many of her poems, “When a Girl Looks Down” takes something from both Hopkins and Yeats, but goes beyond them to explore a distinctly female subject, something they would never have done:
When a girl looks down out of her cloud of hair And gives her breast to the child she has borne, All the suns and the stars that the heavens have worn Since the first magical morning Rain through her milk in each fibre and cell of her darling.
Smith herself never married or had children, so the poem is not based on personal experience, but Smith had a sympathy for the lives of women that extended well beyond anything that had merely happened to her. Smith’s literalizing of Yeats’ “waiting to be born” is perhaps a bit too on-the-nose, but there is gain as well as loss in bringing the metaphor back round again to an actual birth.
Though Smith is clearly a deeply spiritual, and specifically a Christian, poet, her poems rarely express faith or devotion directly. Rather, as she explores different subjects, a pattern of incarnation and resurrection will appear to her naturally in things and events around her, as in the awakening from a dream “The Eye of Humility”:
the seed of Adam enters, Man of Sorrows, with the eternal stars of wounds in His thigh; in the dream, in the charmed dream we were flying out of mind, who now are grounded with the slow root in the invaded womb of time.
Or in the mother nursing her child in “When a Girl Looks Down”:
And releases the flood of girl, of bud, of the horn Whose music starts on a morning journey. In mother, child and all, the One-in-the-many Gathers me nearer to be born.
This pattern appears to her everywhere, and this includes in sexual relationship, even those, as we shall see, which are outside the boundaries sanctioned by the church.
As time went on Smith would continue to experiment and this would eventually led to things like the delightfully weird “The Clown,” which is Smith at her most Wallace Stevens-like. The clown here is not literal, but an everyman, much like the Stevens so enamoured of ice cream, comedians and cookies, (though one that also has common fears, like the fear of death):
In a conical hat of hope that points to the sky, In a clown’s garden of colours, the man runs out On the threshold of morning, coaxing the day He sings to the sun, sings he’s the sun’s darling, A sun himself as he cartwheels over the hills And through the valleys; the spokes of his limbs Piebald praise of himself into the sun, But none, not one pebble hears him, Or, if hearing, answers. There’s not a chink Of creation through which his gladness leaks.
The poem takes a more Audenesque turn, before ending with another vision of the resurrection.
In the cold sheet of his naked skin Stripped forever of motley pride, Touches what dark continent, Goes through the hoops of death And faces what anguished resurrection?
Though this is influenced by Yeats, whose “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem” appropriates Christian imagery for pagan purposes, Smith takes it back for Christianity, though the “anguished” is a little ambivalent, perhaps reflecting the difficulties of making even the best transitions.
Though Smith was a sincere Christian, she was not always strictly follow traditional teachings on sexual relationships, and some of her poems deal with sexual desire, both in and out of her physical relationships with men. It has often been noted how she was one of the first Canadian women to make her desire a central subject. In some of her poems, like “Orchard Morning” there is conventional mingling of sexual and spiritual imagery.
In the first orchard morning you wake to that divine visitor in your bed
The situation resembles Donne’s “The Sun Rising.” There are some differences, however. Donne also writes of both the sexual and spiritual, and uses some of the same fervent language of both, but he is wary of too directly presenting his own sexual relationships, especially those outside of marriage, as images of relationship with God. Smith, perhaps recklessly, is not so reluctant. In a manner more like the early free love advocating William Blake than Donne, the sun, Christ and lover all mingle here until it is difficult to tell them apart.
You see him as deliverer --- as a god I saw him as lion lying down with lamb and (most poignantly and mercifully) ordinary-extraordinary man
Though this relationship obviously affected Smith deeply, his spiritualization in the poem does come at a bit of a cost. In the poem, the lover remains archetypal and individual human personality is hidden behind a veil.
“Old Women and Love,” perhaps her major statement on desire, does not invoke the spiritual quite as directly. Though the explicit reference is to Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” the poem owes at least as much to his Crazy Jane sequence. Smith, however, is not really the wild old wicked woman, a female equivalent of the horny old man poets that have followed on from Yeats, like Derek Walcott or Anthony Hecht. Smith emphasizes the sheer uselessness of female desire in old age, both to the women themselves and to others:
yet they refuse to die they clutter up the earth
Though Walcott and Hecht may know that they inspire disgust, they press on, at least verbally, and never see themselves and their desires as marginal. Unlike Smith, they don’t see themselves as dry kindling, as “frail bones.” On the other hand, Smith refuses to invoke disgust at all. Unlike in Yeats, there are no “foul stys” or “foul rag and bone shops,” much less “raving sluts who keep the till.” Smith’s lament is not that anyone finds the desire of old women disgusting, but that they barely notice it at all, like the young man in “The Old in One Another’s Arms”:
why he smiled at me with mild amusement almost indulgently
Some have tried to present “Old Women and Love” and other similar poems as straightforward affirmations of life, and they can point to the “fierce joy” invoked at the end of “Old Women and Love.” But I don’t think that does justice to the complexity of the feelings here. The joy and affirmation, or at least the fierceness, is real, but so is the darkness and disappointment.
Towards the end of the “Old Women and Love,” Smith call in the spiritual, but only obliquely:
When my eyes opened from the mercy of my own darkness the world came at me like a blow It’s beauty burned gold in every resurrected leaf burned with a still flame. Spring never relents
Mercy and resurrection are there, and the “spring that never relents” echoes Hopkins’ nature that reveals God in being “never spent.” As her friend P.K. Page wrote in the introduction to The Bright Particulars, “The flesh and the spirit are both strong in her. Sometimes at war, sometimes one.” In this poem, they are at least warily reconciled.
Perhaps the most striking of Smith’s reoccurring images is the bone. When they first appear in “The Bird of Sorrow Would Sing” they are ready to move:
The blue sea would stand up and clash its cymbals For me to dance in my worshipping bones
Smith is, at her core, a worshipper, whether of God, the natural world or desire. In “Summer Night, Grand Manan” the bones actually do sing:
And pleasant it is to wake in the night To the multitudinous tongues of the rain, Listening until one’s very bones issue the sweet sound
But though her painter friend Miller Brittain tells her in her elegy for him: “never feel afraid of growing old/you have such good bones” these bones do let her down. Appearing again in “Old Women and Love,” they are, though still capable of devotion, also “frail,” insubstantial, easily caught in the trap of desire. In “A Thighbone” or “The Skeleton in the Closet,” they end up “stripped clean” or “stripped bare.”
Smith’s bones echo the “old bones” of Yeats’ “rag and bone shop of the heart,” but, unlike Yeats, Smith does not take up the image of the flesh as a rag, an image that reoccurs, for example, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” where the “tattered coat” also, though it does not sit on a bone, sits on a stick, a related image. In fact, Smith does use the word “flesh” a few times, and she does mention hands, eyes and arms specifically a number of times, but, aside from the bones, the rest of the body does not much figure in her work. In “Orchard Morning” the body of her lover is mentioned, but nothing specific about it is noted, and the speakers breast, which is mentioned, is cold. This lack of bodiliness is a bit odd, as Smith does frequently mention resurrection. But resurrection of what exactly? The major exception, of course, is “When a Girl Looks Down” where Smith’s identification with the maternal body brings out a more directly incarnational stance.
Bones in Smith also strongly recall the Hebrew prophets and psalm writers. One can easily imagine the worshipping, passionate Smith saying with Jeremiah that there is a burning fire is shut up in her bones. And, like Ezekiel, the older Smith too might ask of her own bones, stripped of their flesh, yet awaiting resurrection, “Can these dry bones live?” Psalm 35 too may be an inspiration: “All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto you?” For a Christian poet, Smith does not echo the text of the Bible as much as you might think, yet parts of it clearly have found their home in her soul.
Though Smith does not seem to have been as deeply affected by his ideas and images as those of Hopkins and Yeats, through most of her life her metrical practices largely followed those of T.S. Eliot, whether as filtered through W.H. Auden or on their own. Accordingly, her early to mid-career work is often based in some sort of traditional metre and rhyme, but, as in Eliot, often applied very irregularly or broken off. In Eliot, this is frequently used to achieve a kind of deflation or to evoke a sense of unease. Smith sometimes uses these techniques for the same ends, but, while there are always lingering influence, she is not really that kind of poet, and as she gets older, she starts to write in different ways.
Smith does mention Auden as and influence and her most obviously Audenesque poem is the ballad “Autobiography.” Unlike Auden, Smith was not a public poet, directly addressing issues of the day, whether political or otherwise. While its form derives from Auden, in one of his more formal modes, the poem’s scale is small and personal, the subject being the death of a sibling. Narratives of events in childhood, particularly deaths in the family, were not a large part of her output, but there are enough of them to be of note, and they tend to be the most directly personal of her works. “Dream Back the Child” is another example, though it is about the death of a more distant relative. There are some poems about people who died while Smith was an adult (her father, and her friend the painter Miller Brittain, for example), but, in those, events and personalities are kept at a distance.
Also unlike Auden, Smith would did not make even a fitful return to traditional form in her later work. Even the early “Autobiography,” perhaps the most regularly formal of her poems, bends and occasionally breaks its rhyme scheme. The similarly themed “Dream Back the Child,” like much of her later verse, adopts a more thoroughgoing, shorter-lined free verse.
Smith’s New and Selected from 1987, The Bright Particulars, was her last book of poems published in her lifetime. She would publish one more chapbook, White Paper Face in the Window, and continued to publish poems in journals throughout the 90s, before her illness and death in 2004. These have mostly not been collected in book form, though one poem from the chapbook and one later poem are included in The Essential Kay Smith, edited by Michael Oliver. This is unfortunate, but somewhat understandable. While Smith was a very good poet, her work is not of such overwhelming greatness as the figures she set herself up against: Yeats, Hopkins, Stevens, Eliot and Auden.
Still, she thoroughly deserves to find new readers, especially those interested in Canadian or Christian poetry. The Essential Kay Smith, though very slim, is still available from Porcupine’s Quill, and used copies of The Bright Particulars can still be found online or in shops across Canada. They don’t entirely overlap.
Learn more about Kay Smith at the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia.
Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.
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