Aging & Wisdom Quote by Stevie Smith

A river talks like an unembarrassed elder, admitting its faults while refusing shame. Smith gives the speaker a blunt physicality: "smelly", "old", "rough in my pebbles", "reedy in my pools". The catalogue isn’t decorative nature-writing; it’s a deliberate anti-pastoral. This water isn’t the clean, symbolic stream of Romantic poetry. It’s a working body with textures, odors, and age, insisting on being loved without being sanitized.

Then the line turns surprisingly tender: "where my fish float by I bless their swimming". The verb "bless" slips spiritual authority into something as ordinary as fish moving through water. The river becomes a caretaker, even a minor deity, but one whose holiness is made out of ecology and habit rather than purity. Smith’s skill is in letting the sacred arrive through the comic and the tactile.

The last clause is the sting: "I like the people to bathe in me especially women". Read straight, it’s a cheeky bit of anthropomorphic desire; read harder, it’s about who gets to occupy public space and whose bodies are watched. The river’s preference dramatizes an ambient cultural male gaze, but displaced onto landscape so it can be voiced without immediate moral policing. Smith, writing in a mid-century Britain that prized propriety, uses a seemingly innocent natural speaker to smuggle in the erotic, the voyeuristic, and the question of consent. The joke is that nature is no puritan; the unease is that neither are we.