Last week, instead of returning here as planned, I wrote a short piece for Prospect about the critical relationship between modern poetry and monarchy in the U.K. You can read it online: Loyal incoherence: the Queen in verse - Prospect Magazine
I had a hunch as I was writing the piece that I would find something psychologically sharp on the subject of monarchy in Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and Drawings (Faber, 2015). But I didn’t have the book to hand, and I ran out of words and time.
I was reminded to find it on Monday night, though, after reading some of the funeral coverage online, and noting its particular fascination with the minutiae of male psychodrama among the Windsors: Princes William and Harry not making eye contact in the funeral procession; King Charles flinching and biting his lip in the chapel at Windsor as “God Save the ____” reached its new final word.
Turning to Stevie Smith I found the perfect commentary: “A King in Funeral Procession”, from her 1942 collection Mother, What is Man? It’s a slyly confusing poem, plunging into its opening lines without explanation: “He blinks he sighs / He is alive they cry.”
Here, in one couplet, are two voices: a narrator and a crowd. There are also two kings: the dead king, whose funeral it is, and the living king, in the procession. As Will May, editor of Collected Poems and Drawings, notes: “George V’s state funeral was on 28 Jan. 1936”. It was broadcast live on B.B.C. radio and also shown as a newsreel in cinemas across the country — and at some point it inspired Smith to write this poem.
The picture above, taken from The Times, shows King Edward VIII, slightly right of centre, in the procession. As the caption notes, he is wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet — which helps to explain the crowd’s desire to “see him breathe / Show us the heartbeat / And the dedicated sleeve”. The gold stripes that distinguish the cuffs of the Admiral of the Fleet aren’t visible in the photo, perhaps due to bad light, or an overcoat — but that’s the literal meaning of Smith’s “dedicated sleeve”.
The metaphorical meaning takes us into the deeper subject of the poem: the crowd’s desire to see both the real person (“the heartbeat”) and the symbolic figure encasing him (the “sleeve”) — the two bodies of the monarch, that is, in step.
Smith’s ceremonial metonymy follows on from John Betjeman’s “Death of King George V” (1936), which begins with “Spirits of well-shot woodcock” carrying the spirit of the dead king “up the Norfolk sky”, and ends with an anxious nation watching as “a young man lands hatless from the air.” Now, the plane-hopping prince is properly dressed and grounded.
Like Betjeman, Smith evokes the collective psychology of monarchism, as it flickers between realism and symbolism, trying to reconcile the two. The result is the mixture of high reverence and minute judgement that characterises both the crowd’s thoughts and British media coverage of the royal family in general (the original title of Betjeman’s “Death of King George V” was “Daily Express”):
He looks ill
They are satisfied he is looking that way
It is no more than he should
He looks ill
O.K.
Here is the new king “face to face at last with the drudgery and the responsibility” of kingship, as The Times put it with grim relish on 29th January 1936. Those responsibilities include being looked at everywhere he goes:
Lift the baby
Let her see him
Lift up the baby
Give her a lift up then.
Smith’s chatty redundancy and rhythmical impatience here acutely catch the need for the crowd to make the moment special through a surrogate for their own innocence (compare, less subtly, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem last week on the procession of the Queen’s body from Scotland to London: “babies held aloft in the towns, to one day / be told they were there”).
Will May, as editor of Smith’s poems, knows a lot about them. But I think he is wrong when he says, in his book Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2010), that the poem ends “by voicing the thoughts of the dead man himself”:
This final stanza, surely, presents the silent thoughts of the living king, for whom babies are held up. He is now, in his dedicated sleeve, “their picture book”, as Smith’s perky baby and knowing mother seem to understand: his blinks, his sighs, his illness, his loss of “proud looks” — all these, now, are for their entertainment.