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 seems 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 really wicked motion

Leaps for sailors’ funeral

Holds her panting. Oh the creature

Oh the wicked virile thing

With its skin of fleck and shadow

Stretching tightening over him.

Wild yet captured wild yet captured

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 a hardly 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.

Source: The New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988)