By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart
(1945)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a novel of prose poetry by Canadian author, Elizabeth Smart, and is commonly believed to be based on her affair with poet George Barker. The title alludes to Psalm 137, which begins "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept"; the contrast between religious ascendancy and the banal everyday in the title contributes to the thematic juxtaposition between the passion of love and the vapidity of routine. The monomania described by Smart occurs at a sustained level of emotion, which moves from ecstasy to anguish as the text develops.

A sense of shame induced by societal disapproval is evident throughout By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, particularly when considering the wife of the man she has an affair with (as the religious semantics used to describe her suggest her purity and goodness). However, Smart also shows a pride and defiance in her nature as she says that love makes her "an empress of a new-found land" and describes seeing in her reflection "the face that launched a thousand nights of love. This is the trap that lured the archangel into your bed: this is the precarious instruments that pulls polestars to you." Similarly, the dichotomy between bureaucracy and poetry that Smart creates by responding to a police officer's questions by quoting Songs of Songs which instantly makes the guard seem small minded, reacting barbarously to a sublime experience he is ignorant of. However, the frequent comparisons of love to poison and death indicate what is eventually proved by the narrative: that the love Smart experiences is ultimately destructive.

Themes and Relevant Quotes

Attitudes to Love	Time / Fate	Jealousy	Religion / Guilt	Death / Love
"I am indeed mortally pierced with the seeds of love." "My heart is its own destructive. It beats out the poisonous rhythm of the truth." "O water of love that floods everything over, so that there is nothing the eye sees that is not covered in." "I smile, but I am in a trance, there is no reality but love." "We're family men, they said, We don't go so much for love." "What was my defence but one small word which I dared not utter, because jazz singers and hypocritical preachers and Dorothy Dix had so maligned it." "Love offends with its nudity." "the wisdom old people get because they cannot remember the passion." "Girls in love, be harlots, it hurts less."	"It is a slow motion process of a guillotine in action," "but the future is already done. It is written. Nothing can escape." "No my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life." "I am possessed by love and have no options." "All time is now... Nothing can ever be more than now, and before this nothing was." "And if the she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me." "Fate, receive my final ultimatum... my last unchangeable will."	"offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy" "We can include the world in our love, and no irritations can disrupt it, not even envy." "Women are so possessive." "I can carry love like Saint Christopher... It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on." "The bed is cold and jealousy is cruel as the grave." "O he may at one glance, restore me and flood me with so much new love that every scar will have a satin covering"	"her madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the untempted." "her thin breasts are pitiful like Virgin Shrines that have been robbed." "Is there a way at all to avoid offending the lamb of God?" "Love lifted the weapon and guided my crime," "her anguish rose out of the sea to cry Help, and now that piercing face superimposes the cloudy mask of my desire." "Asking no one's forgiveness for sins I refuse to recognize, why do I cry then to be returning homeward" "I was dazzlingly happy on top of her profound and excruciating misery... But it is not for her my heart opens and breaks: I die again and again only for myself." "My love is crucified on a floating cross, and cries out hoarsely my name in the night."	"They [doves] are the hangmen pronouncing my sentence in the suitable language of love." "kisses whose chemicals are even more deadly if undelivered." "I never was in love with death before, nor felt grateful because the rocks below could promise certain dearth... For there is no beauty in denying love, except perhaps by death" "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as death." "Love is strong as death." "It is the faces we once kissed that are being smashed in the English coastal towns," "My love hovers around his murder. I cannot call him. I cannot say, Make the final kill," "But the sea that floods is love, and it gushes out of my arterial wound. I am drowning in it."

Critical Responses

• "the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. (BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.)" - Angela Carter describing one of her motivations for founding the feminist press Virago, to her friend Lorna Sage 
• "a violent and adroit piece of home-wrecking" - Cyril Connolly (1945)
• "It [By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept]... was banned in Canada, and when six copies made their way to a shop in Ottawa, Elizabeth's mother had them burned; she described them as 'erotomania'." - Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 (Anna Snaith)