Rediscovering Charlotte Mew

When I picked my undergraduate dissertation topic (a scary number of years ago now), I startled myself. You see, my plan had been to research Virginia Woolf. I'd read Mrs Dalloway during my second year and I was in a modernist phase. In the event, and not really knowing how I came across her, I alighted on Charlotte Mew. I have no memory of how I got from Woolf to Mew - or even why - but it seemed to be a damn good decision. 

I think there are certain moments in your life when you need to cling onto a writer because they offer a sense of security or allow escapism. My third year at university was such a time. Although I'd finally made a friend and found myself actually talking to people, I was living in a house with fourteen strangers who didn't have my sense of being respectful to others. Looking back now, I wonder that one of them didn't get pushed 'accidentally' down the stairs. Anyway, the point is, while I did literally all of my essay and dissertation writing on campus because I hated spending time in the house, the reading was something I did on my bedroom floor.

It was an attic room, a long thin space, and the only reason I'd jumped head-first into a house share. It was gorgeous and I loved it. One afternoon, not long after the household had been fined for a party (which I'd left the county overnight to avoid) I finally knuckled down to reading Charlotte Mew's poetry. I'd done all of the background reading, including Penelope Fitzgerald's wonderful biography, but I'd struggled to find the right 'moment' to properly analyse Mew's poetry line by line. As I read it aloud, the racket from the rest of the house disintegrated. I was sucked in.

I've previously said on this blog that 'Rooms' is my favourite Mew poem - and that's true. But I also mentioned in that post that 'The Trees Are Down' ranks up there too. For some reason, when I think of that afternoon, it's the poem that comes back to me most sharply. I read it over and over, making unnecessary notes in the margins that I don't think I ever looked at once I'd written my dissertation.

Until yesterday, that is. On one level, the poem is about turning points, change. Just at the moment I'm trying to find my courage, just as I had to back then. The poem has the same peculiar resonance it had then. I can only hope it soothes me now as much as it did seven years ago.

A Pause For Thought: The Cenotaph by Charlotte Mew

This is one of my favourite poems about the Great War. It's not written by a soldier or even a widow but by my all-time favourite poet, Charlotte Mew. I think it encapsulates what the families at home - and those left behind - feel and how quickly the world turns away from the sacrifices made by our loyal defenders. The quest to remember them is why we observe a two minute silence each year at 11:00 on the 11th November but it should by no means be the only time in a year that we think of them.


The Cenotaph by Charlotte Mew
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head.
And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, tinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs,
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
               To lovers—to mothers
               Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see 
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead
For this will stand in our Marketplace—
              Who’ll sell, who’ll buy
              (Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

What Does Your Favourite Poem Say About You?

Once I'd finished my undergraduate dissertation on poetry I held my hands up and declared 'no more'. For four months my daily goal had been to dissect poetry from several masters of the form: T.S Eliot, W.B Yeats and Thomas Hardy amongst them. I was sick to death of poetry, I thought, and I'd let the books fester on my shelves for a respectable period before they mysteriously found themselves in the recycling bin. Then, when my father asked me what I wanted for my birthday (my 21st) I surprised the both of us by asking for the complete poems of Christina Rossetti. He was a little dubious - he wanted something that wouldn't depress me to hell to remind me of the milestone - but in the end we compromised on a bracelet and the book. I read the book more than I wear the bracelet.

The thing about poetry is that you either love it or hate it. Lots of very talented fiction writers see it as a lesser form because of its comparative length but, in truth, poetry is exceptionally difficult. I think the reason some novelists and short story writers abhor the poetic form is because it scares them to death.

I don't profess to write poetry. But I am an avid reader. I got to thinking about my favourite poet, Charlotte Mew (the one my dissertation was based around), and why I liked her so much.

First off, there are biographical attractions. Native of the Isle of Wight; closested lesbian; fearful of the heriditary insanity that hung around her family like a black cloud; finally committed suicide in the face of that madness: she was an interesting person whose poetical works were admired by poets such Hardy, Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf.

But, more than the allure of a repressed Victorian woman, there's the poetry itself. I have two favourite poems written by Mew. 'The Trees Are Down' and 'Rooms', which is transcribed below.

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide -
Rooms where for good or ill - things died.
But there is this room where we two lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun - in the rain.

It remains the only poem I can recite - and I recite it to myself fairly often. Whether it reminds me of the fruitlessness of life (and so not to get too worked up when things don't go as planned), or whether I use it as a stimulant to change something in my life I'm unhappy with, it's a friend in times of need. I've got other favourite poems, even modern ones, but this is the only one that touches me each time I read it.

So what does that say about me, I wonder?

For more information about Charlotte Mew visit: http://studymore.org.uk/ymew.htm