Deliberately or serendipitously, Smith's song reworks Sylvia Plath's poem "I Am Vertical," which itself replies to Auden's lines, "Let us honor, if we can,/ The vertical man,/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one."
The big difference? Auden was an emotionally healthy man for whom our general tendency to value the dead over the living could only appear as an irony and an insult to life itself. Plath and Smith were suicidal depressives for whom death figures as a consummation devoutly to be wished. The fact that dying not only relieves us of life's difficulties--"the pressure of days," as Smith calls them elsewhere--but also invests us with "value"--in Auden's words--renders it doubly attractive to Plath and Smith.
In both cases you have death aestheticized, made beautiful through its connection with natural cycles. Plath's poem thus ends, "I shall be useful when I lie down finally:/ Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me." Compare that to Smith's refrain: "While the moon does its division/ You're buried below/ And it's coming up roses everywhere./
You've gone red roses."
Did Smith know the Plath poem, or the Auden poem? Maybe. For a guy his age, he was pretty well read in literature and philosophy. But it doesn't matter that much. The idea that life is a "conspiracy against the human race" (Thomas Ligotti), a "burden" (Schopenhauer), a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing"--this forms one of the great echo-chambers of western art.
Deliberately or serendipitously, Smith's song reworks Sylvia Plath's poem "I Am Vertical," which itself replies to Auden's lines, "Let us honor, if we can,/ The vertical man,/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one."
The big difference? Auden was an emotionally healthy man for whom our general tendency to value the dead over the living could only appear as an irony and an insult to life itself. Plath and Smith were suicidal depressives for whom death figures as a consummation devoutly to be wished. The fact that dying not only relieves us of life's difficulties--"the pressure of days," as Smith calls them elsewhere--but also invests us with "value"--in Auden's words--renders it doubly attractive to Plath and Smith.
In both cases you have death aestheticized, made beautiful through its connection with natural cycles. Plath's poem thus ends, "I shall be useful when I lie down finally:/ Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me." Compare that to Smith's refrain: "While the moon does its division/ You're buried below/ And it's coming up roses everywhere./ You've gone red roses."
Did Smith know the Plath poem, or the Auden poem? Maybe. For a guy his age, he was pretty well read in literature and philosophy. But it doesn't matter that much. The idea that life is a "conspiracy against the human race" (Thomas Ligotti), a "burden" (Schopenhauer), a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing"--this forms one of the great echo-chambers of western art.