SOURCE: An introduction to Stevie Smith: A Selection, edited by Hermione Lee, Faber & Faber, 1983, pp. 17-31.

Lee is an English educator and critic. In the following essay, she offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Smith's poetry.

Like much of Stevie Smith's work, this poem ('The Hostage') makes a reasoned, humorous, and dignified case for welcoming Death, as Seneca and the Stoics did. But it is a useful starting point in other ways, too. The lady's unexplained dramatic situation ('You hang at dawn, they said') is one of many mysterious journeys, fatal or fortunate quests, in Stevie Smith's poems and fictions. Her characters are perpetually saying goodbye to their friends, riding away on dangerous missions, like Browning's Childe Roland, or getting lost in a blue light or a dark wood. One 'lady' is swept off by her huge hat on to a 'peculiar island'; others are magicked out...