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Selected Poems: Charlotte Mew
In her tragically short life, Charlotte Mew produced poetry that was intense, emotional, original, and praised by her contemporaries Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, and Virginia Woolf. Gathered together by Ireland's most distinguished modern female poet, this collection includes a diverse range of her work, dealing with pain, love, and feminist themes.
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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375 people want to read
About the author
Charlotte Mew
58 books29 followersCharlotte Mary Mew was a modernist British poet. Mew's father, architect Frederick Mew, died in 1898 without making adequate provision for his family; two of her siblings suffered from mental illness, and were committed to institutions, and three others died in early childhood leaving Charlotte, her mother and her sister, Anne. Charlotte and Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on insanity to their children.
In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story into The Yellow Book, but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day, Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and quite unlike anyone else," and Siegfried Sassoon. She obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties.
After the death of her sister, she descended into a deep depression, and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol. Mew is buried in Hampstead Cemetery.
In 1894, Mew succeeded in getting a short story into The Yellow Book, but wrote very little poetry at this time. Her first collection of poetry, The Farmer's Bride, was published in 1916. Mew gained the patronage of several literary figures, notably Thomas Hardy, who called her the best woman poet of her day, Virginia Woolf, who said she was "very good and quite unlike anyone else," and Siegfried Sassoon. She obtained a small Civil List pension with the aid of Cockerell, Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. This helped ease her financial difficulties.
After the death of her sister, she descended into a deep depression, and was admitted to a nursing home where she eventually committed suicide by drinking Lysol. Mew is buried in Hampstead Cemetery.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 18, 2021
If things are so it does not matter why:
But everything has burned, and not quite through.
The colours of the world have turned
To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
In what used to be such a leaden sky.
When you are burned quite through you die.
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere —
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
I think that my soul is red
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
But when these are dead
They have had their hour.
I shall have had mine, too,
For from head to feet
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.
The things that kill us seem
Blind to the death they give:
It is only in our dream
The things that kill us live.
*
May 28, 2012
Aw, I feel it's very hard for me to pass on my love for Charlotte Mew because I get so ridiculous about her work. My admiration for her is just this kind of ceaselessly multiplying wave of softheartedness and solitary sadness and pure fangirl flailing which assaults my soul whenever I read her poems.
Favourite bits (oh, I am so sentimental, I like the sweetest / softest / sincerest poems not the most clever ones):
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife;
And the crimson haunts you everywhere -
Thin shafts of sunlight like the ghosts reddened swords have stuck our stair
As if, coming down, you had split your life.
from 'The Quiet House'
But first I want your life: - before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.
from 'On the Road to the Sea' (which in its entity is probably my favourite poem in the book)
My heart is lame with running after yours so fast
Such a long way,
Shall we walk slowly home, looking at all the things we passed
Perhaps to-day?
Home down the quiet evening roads under the quiet skies,
Not saying much,
Yo for a moment giving me your eyes
When you could bear my touch.
But not to-morrow. This has taken all my breath;
Then, though you look the same,
There may be something lovelier in Love's face in death
As your heart sees it, running back the way we came;
My heart is lame.'
'My Heart is Lame'
Favourite bits (oh, I am so sentimental, I like the sweetest / softest / sincerest poems not the most clever ones):
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife;
And the crimson haunts you everywhere -
Thin shafts of sunlight like the ghosts reddened swords have stuck our stair
As if, coming down, you had split your life.
from 'The Quiet House'
But first I want your life: - before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.
from 'On the Road to the Sea' (which in its entity is probably my favourite poem in the book)
My heart is lame with running after yours so fast
Such a long way,
Shall we walk slowly home, looking at all the things we passed
Perhaps to-day?
Home down the quiet evening roads under the quiet skies,
Not saying much,
Yo for a moment giving me your eyes
When you could bear my touch.
But not to-morrow. This has taken all my breath;
Then, though you look the same,
There may be something lovelier in Love's face in death
As your heart sees it, running back the way we came;
My heart is lame.'
'My Heart is Lame'
August 3, 2021
Readable; traditional meets modern, harmonious, with a sprinkle of Victorian-induced depression. Indeed, these poems bleed sadness and confusion.
À quoi bon dire
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
À quoi bon dire
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
June 7, 2017
I gave it a chance
poetry isn't my thing
reading or writing.
poetry isn't my thing
reading or writing.
January 26, 2014
“I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.”
This quote from “Rooms” reads almost like an epitaph.
With Charlotte Mew we are in the period between the Victorians and the Moderns, and into one of my favorites periods in English literature. This period (so they say) betrayed the exhaustion of the Romantic impetus and required a revolution in poetry. The proposition is flawed on several counts, but that is another subject . I only note that the period included along with Charlotte Mew, the 1890’s Yeats, John Masefield, Ernest Dowson, the early Frost, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy and Francis Thompson.
This is not the place to express my feeling that the modernist bulldozers came and uprooted all the trees and flowers, pushing enchanting poets like Charlotte Mew far into the background so that they are hardly known now; nor to argue that, considering how little place poetry has in our current culture, the modernists obliterated not only their predecessors from our consciousness, but, in the final analysis, themselves as well.
I only want to be one more to call attention to this neglected poet, and to quote a few of her poems is all I can really contribute.
“I Have Been Through the Gates”
“His heart to me, was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers;
I saw it then as we see things in dreams,--I do not remember how long I slept;
I remember the trees, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always on the towers;
The walls are standing to-day, and the gates; I have been through the gates, I have groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness is over them;
His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly rain, unclean and unswept,
Like the heart of the holy city, old blind, beautiful Jerusalem;
Over which Christ wept “
Here Mew uses certain Modernist techniques (she seems ahead of her time): an a-logical movement from image to image, a lack of coherent narrative or dialectic, and an expansion of the English prosody; however, the techniques are put to much better use dialectic than is generally the case. The reader “feels along” with the poem, though the intellect may lag behind (and maybe never catch up). She used such techniques in other poems. How much of her technique did T. S Eliot copy? He cribbed from pretty much everyone else, why not her?
“In the Fields”
Lord when I look at lovely things which pass,
Under old trees the shadow of young leaves
Dancing to please the wind along the grass,
Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves;
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
Over the fields. They come in spring.
Can I believe there is a lovelier lyric than this? I suppose, but one must look far and wide.
“May 1916”
“Let us remember Spring will come again
To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees
Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun. And even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit to-day with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things and changing skies.”
In looking a little more closely at Charlotte Mew for the writing of this review, I have noticed two things: 1) she is a more accomplished poet than I had realized - her emotional tentacles extend deep and wide, her perspective on a given topic is nuanced and many sided; nearly every poem she wrote in worthy of attention, and 2) though she is little known, virtually everyone who cares for her is, as I am, astonished that she is not better known. She deserves much more attention than she has received. Why is every high school student exposed to William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow poem and the one about the plums in the fridge, but are never exposed to those above by Charlotte Mew? It is a condemnation of our educational system and indeed of our culture (should further evidence be needed).
There ought to have been a place for Charlotte Mew in this world, but there wasn’t; though she wrote such beautiful verse, she was poor, a lesbian, eccentric in dress and manner, haunted by the insanity which ran in her family and rebuffed in love. She died of suicide while languishing prematurely in a nursing home.
“I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.”
In the steady slowing down of the heart.”
This quote from “Rooms” reads almost like an epitaph.
With Charlotte Mew we are in the period between the Victorians and the Moderns, and into one of my favorites periods in English literature. This period (so they say) betrayed the exhaustion of the Romantic impetus and required a revolution in poetry. The proposition is flawed on several counts, but that is another subject . I only note that the period included along with Charlotte Mew, the 1890’s Yeats, John Masefield, Ernest Dowson, the early Frost, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy and Francis Thompson.
This is not the place to express my feeling that the modernist bulldozers came and uprooted all the trees and flowers, pushing enchanting poets like Charlotte Mew far into the background so that they are hardly known now; nor to argue that, considering how little place poetry has in our current culture, the modernists obliterated not only their predecessors from our consciousness, but, in the final analysis, themselves as well.
I only want to be one more to call attention to this neglected poet, and to quote a few of her poems is all I can really contribute.
“I Have Been Through the Gates”
“His heart to me, was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers;
I saw it then as we see things in dreams,--I do not remember how long I slept;
I remember the trees, and the high, white walls, and how the sun was always on the towers;
The walls are standing to-day, and the gates; I have been through the gates, I have groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood; they are empty; darkness is over them;
His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly rain, unclean and unswept,
Like the heart of the holy city, old blind, beautiful Jerusalem;
Over which Christ wept “
Here Mew uses certain Modernist techniques (she seems ahead of her time): an a-logical movement from image to image, a lack of coherent narrative or dialectic, and an expansion of the English prosody; however, the techniques are put to much better use dialectic than is generally the case. The reader “feels along” with the poem, though the intellect may lag behind (and maybe never catch up). She used such techniques in other poems. How much of her technique did T. S Eliot copy? He cribbed from pretty much everyone else, why not her?
“In the Fields”
Lord when I look at lovely things which pass,
Under old trees the shadow of young leaves
Dancing to please the wind along the grass,
Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves;
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
Over the fields. They come in spring.
Can I believe there is a lovelier lyric than this? I suppose, but one must look far and wide.
“May 1916”
“Let us remember Spring will come again
To the scorched, blackened woods, where all the wounded trees
Wait, with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun. And even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit to-day with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things and changing skies.”
In looking a little more closely at Charlotte Mew for the writing of this review, I have noticed two things: 1) she is a more accomplished poet than I had realized - her emotional tentacles extend deep and wide, her perspective on a given topic is nuanced and many sided; nearly every poem she wrote in worthy of attention, and 2) though she is little known, virtually everyone who cares for her is, as I am, astonished that she is not better known. She deserves much more attention than she has received. Why is every high school student exposed to William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow poem and the one about the plums in the fridge, but are never exposed to those above by Charlotte Mew? It is a condemnation of our educational system and indeed of our culture (should further evidence be needed).
There ought to have been a place for Charlotte Mew in this world, but there wasn’t; though she wrote such beautiful verse, she was poor, a lesbian, eccentric in dress and manner, haunted by the insanity which ran in her family and rebuffed in love. She died of suicide while languishing prematurely in a nursing home.
“I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.”
December 13, 2022
charlotte mew is proof that sad gay people write the best poetry
May 5, 2020
Funny how when you got to know how the poet died, it automatically impacted the way you reading her works. That's what i felt when i read her poems. You can trace sadness and pain hidden so deep that you cant catch it in just one glance. Her childhood was filled with death, she loses her siblings quite early. Then, she struggle with her sexuality and constant rejection from people that she has an affection with. Then her sister died of cancer leaving her behind. That was a breaking point for her and causing her to off herself. Some said , depression. Some said, loneliness. Some said, Grief. Whatever it is, she did left this world a legacy. A poems and proses to be enjoyed, to be understood and to be interpreted according to people who read it.
.
.
I think that my soul is red,
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower,
But when these are dead,
They have had their hour.
I shall have had mine too,
For from head to feet,
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.
The things that killed us seem,
blind to the death they give.
It is only in our dream,
The things that killed us live.
.
.
I think that my soul is red,
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower,
But when these are dead,
They have had their hour.
I shall have had mine too,
For from head to feet,
I am burned and stabbed half through,
And the pain is deadly sweet.
The things that killed us seem,
blind to the death they give.
It is only in our dream,
The things that killed us live.
January 8, 2023
Highlights - Rooms and The Quiet House, and Boland’s great introduction.
“No year has been like this that has just gone by;
It may be that what Father says is true,
If things are so it does not matter why:
But everything has burned, and not quite through.
The colours of the world have turned
To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
In what used to be such a leaden sky.
When you are burned quite through you die.”
“No year has been like this that has just gone by;
It may be that what Father says is true,
If things are so it does not matter why:
But everything has burned, and not quite through.
The colours of the world have turned
To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
In what used to be such a leaden sky.
When you are burned quite through you die.”
July 6, 2025
In the Fields
Lord when I look at lovely things which pass,
Under old trees the shadows of young leaves
Dancing to please the wind along the grass,
Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves;
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
Over the fields. They come in Spring
Lord when I look at lovely things which pass,
Under old trees the shadows of young leaves
Dancing to please the wind along the grass,
Or the gold stillness of the August sun on the August sheaves;
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?
They come at evening with the home-flying rooks and the scent of hay,
Over the fields. They come in Spring
December 13, 2017
Mew is a wonderfully talented poet and was noted for her talents by several of her famous contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Sadly, she is now all but forgotten. I believe her work is still worth reading and analysing in the current era for themes such as social exclusion, female oppression, relgion and so on.
September 21, 2021
We were like children last week, in the Strand;
That was the day you laughed at me
Because I tried to make you understand
The cheap, stale chap I used to be
Before I saw the things you made me see.
That was the day you laughed at me
Because I tried to make you understand
The cheap, stale chap I used to be
Before I saw the things you made me see.
November 18, 2021
Beautiful, aching poems with a magnificent introduction by Eavan Boland (really, read it). There’s so much yearning in Mew’s poetry; it lives in the line breaks, the declarations and exclamations, the obsession with mortality… I can’t wait to go back for a second read and discover more.
March 6, 2023
True Rating: 4,5⭐
Because of poets like this, I don't regret starting to read more poetry in the past year. So underrated.
Discovered thanks to the introduction of "The Stolen Heir" by lady Holly Black
Because of poets like this, I don't regret starting to read more poetry in the past year. So underrated.
Discovered thanks to the introduction of "The Stolen Heir" by lady Holly Black
August 21, 2018
I heard an angel crying
‘hurt not the trees.’
‘hurt not the trees.’
April 16, 2020
A devastating voice characterizes these unforgettable poems.
June 8, 2020
My fave poet
December 20, 2021
So far, so good--so very good.
June 18, 2014
I very much enjoyed this collection of Charlotte Mew poems... it had all of my favorites and others that I had not yet read. Overall a good collection, with an excellent introduction by Eavan Boland.
October 14, 2013
Her poems make me feel warm and fuzzy. Road of the Sea is my favorite so sincere, soft and sweet. Reminds me that poems don't have to flashy to be good.
September 27, 2014
A collection of undoubtedly beautiful and thought-provoking poems. I'm very interested in Mew's life too, so I will now be researching that, and will be looking for connections within her poetry.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews