Famous for four words – "Not Waving but Drowning" – the Londoner Stevie Smith (1902–71) is otherwise a difficult poet to classify. Her milieu is somewhere between the comic, the twee and the neurotic: her chief virtues are her oddnesss, and the discipline with which that oddness is sustained through single poems. "Pretty", for instance – published in the TLS in 1959 – seems at first an obsessive, atmospheric reprise of the theme of Nature "red in tooth and claw", until the closing stanzas, which reveal a human raptor and an unsuspected impulse behind the poem.

Pretty

Why is the word pretty so underrated?
In November the leaf is pretty when it falls
The stream grows deep in the woods after rain
And in the pretty pool the pike stalks.

He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,
The prey escapes with an underwater flash
But not for long, the great fish has him now
The pike is a fish who always has his prey,

And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty
His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils
As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between
The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind.

The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty
The lake water below him rustles with ice
There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist
All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.

Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes,
It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,
Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier
A field in the evening, tilting up.

The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late
The sky is lighter than the hill field
All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary
Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty,

And it is careless, and that is always pretty
This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless
As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps means nothing, and this is pretty.

So a person can come along like a thief – pretty! –
Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,
Lick the icicle broken from the bank
And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.

Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity,
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

STEVIE SMITH (1959)

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