Stevie Smith (actually Florence Margaret Smith, 1902 –1971) was a poet unlike any other—like William Blake and Emily Dickinson. Of course all poets are different, and have to be, but some are more different than others. Smith was deserted by her father, spent three years in a sanatorium as a child, lost her mother to death when she was a teenager, was depressed most of her life, and seems to have been celibate, although she did have friends. The last lines of her most famous poem “Not Waving But Drowning” are “I was much too far out all my life/And not waving but drowning.” Death as well as humour features in many of her poems, as it should, and this simple poem explains why death is ultimately a friend to us all. It’s actually the last stanza of a longer poem, but I didn’t much like the earlier stanzas—and I think that this last stanza words well as a complete poem.

My friend death

Why do I think of Death
As a friend?
It is because he is a scatterer,
He scatters the human frame
The nerviness and the great pain,
Throws it on the fresh fresh air
And now it is nowhere.
Only sweet Death does this,
Kind Death, kind Death,
Of all the gods you are best.