Charlotte Mew : 21 Poems

 

The Farmer’s Bride
   
     Three summers since I chose a maid,
     Too young maybe—but more’s to do
     At harvest-time than bide and woo.
              When us was wed she turned afraid
     Of love and me and all things human;
     Like the shut of a winter’s day
     Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman—
            More like a little frightened fay.
                    One night, in the Fall, she runned away.
 
     “Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
     ’Should properly have been abed;
     But sure enough she wadn’t there
     Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
     We chased her, flying like a hare
     Before out lanterns. To Church-Town
              All in a shiver and a scare
     We caught her, fetched her home at last
              And turned the key upon her, fast.
 
     She does the work about the house
     As well as most, but like a mouse:
              Happy enough to chat and play
              With birds and rabbits and such as they,
              So long as men-folk keep away.
     “Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech
     When one of us comes within reach.
              The women say that beasts in stall
              Look round like children at her call.
              I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.
 
     Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
     Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
     Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
     To her wild self. But what to me?
 
     The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
              The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
     One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
              A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
     On the black earth spread white with rime,
     The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
              What’s Christmas-time without there be
              Some other in the house than we!
 
              She sleeps up in the attic there
              Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
     Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
     The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!

Beside the Bed

 
Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded
   The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:
So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned
                                   or scolded;
   But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.
 
Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden
   The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:
Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would
                                 quiver and redden,
   Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.
 
Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken
   It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep:
I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed
                                   suddenly and broken,
   This is only a most piteous pretence of sleep!

The Pedlar
 
Lend me, a little while, the key
    That locks your heavy heart, and I'll give you back--
Rarer than books and ribbons and beads bright to see,
    This little Key of Dreams out of my pack.
 
The road, the road, beyond men's bolted doors,
     There shall I walk and you go free of me,
For yours lies North across the moors,
     And mine lies South. To what sea?
 
How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by,
   While my gay ghost caught and kissed yours, as ghosts don't do,
And by the wayside, this forgotten you and I
   Sat, and were twenty-two?
 
Give me the key that locks your tired eyes,
     And I will lend you this one from my pack,
Brighter than colored beads and painted books that make men wise:
     Take it. No, give it back!

 

 The Changeling
 
 
Toll no bell for me, dear Father dear Mother,
      Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
      Who plays in the place called Paradise,
Your children all, your children for ever;
        But I, so wild,
Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
    Never, I know, but half your child!
 
In the garden at play, all day, last summer,
              Far and away I heard
The sweet "tweet-tweet" of a strange new-comer,
     The dearest, clearest call of a bird.
It lived down there in the deep green hollow,
     My own old home, and the fairies say
The word of a bird is a thing to follow,
     So I was away a night and a day.
 
One evening, too, by the nursery fire,
      We snuggled close and sat round so still,
When suddenly as the wind blew higher,
      Something scratched on the window-sill,
A pinched brown face peered in--I shivered;
      No one listened or seemed to see;
The arms of it waved and the wings of it quivered,
      Whoo--I knew it had come for me!
      Some are as bad as bad can be!
All night long they danced in the rain,
Round and round in a dripping chain,
Threw their caps at the window-pane,
    Tried to make me scream and shout
    And fling the bedclothes all about:
I meant to stay in bed that night,
And if only you had left a light
    They would never have got me out!
 
    Sometimes I wouldn't speak, you see,
    Or answer when you spoke to me,
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring
You can hear the whole world whispering;
     The shy green grasses making love,
     The feathers grow on the dear grey dove,
     The tiny heart of the redstart beat,
     The patter of the squirrel's feet,
The pebbles pushing in the silver streams,
The rushes talking in their dreams,
     The swish-swish of the bat's black wings,
     The wild-wood bluebell's sweet ting-tings,
          Humming and hammering at your ear,
        Everything there is to hear
In the heart of hidden things.
     But not in the midst of the nursery riot,
     That's why I wanted to be quiet,
          Couldn't do my sums, or sing,
          Or settle down to anything.
     And when, for that, I was sent upstairs
     I did kneel down to say my prayers;
But the King who sits on your high church steeple
Has nothing to do with us fairy people!
 
'Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,
    Learned all my lessons and liked to play,
And dearly I loved the little pale brother
    Whom some other bird must have called away.
Why did they bring me here to make me
    Not quite bad and not quite good,
Why, unless They're wicked, do They want, in spite, to take me
    Back to Their wet, wild wood?
Now, every nithing I shall see the windows shining,
     The gold lamp's glow, and the fire's red gleam,
While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us are whining
         In the hollow by the stream.
Black and chill are Their nights on the wold;
     And They live so long and They feel no pain:
I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,
        I shall never come back again!

 

 

The Quiet House
 

When we were children old Nurse used to say,
     The house was like an auction or a fair
      Until the lot of us were safe in bed.
      It has been quiet as the country-side
      Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died
And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.
After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,
    Poor Father, and he does not care
    For people here, or to go anywhere.
 
To get away to Aunt's for that week-end
     Was hard enough; (since then, a year ago,
     He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight — )
At first I did not like my cousin's friend,
     I did not think I should remember him:
     His voice has gone, his face is growing dim
And if I like him now I do not know.
    He frightened me before he smiled —
    He did not ask me if he might —
    He said that he would come one Sunday night,
    He spoke to me as if I were a child.
 
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.
 
    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.
 
The room is shut where Mother died,
    The other rooms are as they were,
The world goes on the same outside,
    The sparrows fly across the Square,
    The children play as we four did there,
    The trees grow green and brown and bare,
The sun shines on the dead Church spire,
    And nothing lives here but the fire.
While Father watches from his chair
                        Day follows day
The same, or now and then a different grey,
                        Till, like his hair,
Which Mother said was wavy once and bright,
                       They will all turn white.
 
   To-night I heard a bell again —
Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,
The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,
                           No one for me —
    I think it is myself I go to meet:
I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be

 

 On the Asylum Road
 
Theirs is the house whose windows—every pane—
    Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
    The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.
 
But still we merry town or village folk
    Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
    With the incarnate wages of man's sin.
 
None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet.
    The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
       The hare-bell bowing on his stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
    To fainter music; nor do we to them
       Make their life sweet.
 
The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
    Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
    To them, yes, every pane!

The Cenotaph
 
 
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 twinkling 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 Market-place—
                                     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 face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

From the Window
 
 
               Up here, with June, the sycamore throws
               Across the window a whispering screen;
        I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,
Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.
             But I mean to go through the door without fear,
             Not caring much what happens here
                           When I’m away:—
How green the screen is across the panes
              Or who goes laughing along the lanes
        With my old lover all summer day.

Not for That City
 
Not for that city of the level sun,
         Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze –
        The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,
White nights, or nights and days that are as one –
We weary, when all said, all thought, all done.
        We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
        What, from the threshold of eternity
We shall step into. No, I think we shun
The splendour of that everlasting glare,
        The clamour of that never-ending song.
        And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
            Which winds to silence and a space for sleep
            Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

Rooms
 
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 for ill—things died.
But there is the 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.

Monsieur Qui Passe
(Quai Voltaire)
 
A purple blot against the dead white door
In my friend's rooms, bathed in their vile pink light,
I had not noticed her before
She snatched my eyes and threw them back to me:
She did not speak till we came out into the night,
Paused at this bench beside the klosk on the quay.
 
God knows precisely what she said--
I left to her the twisted skein,
Though here and there I caught a thread,--
Something, at first, about "the lamps along the Seine,
And Paris, with that witching card of Spring
Kept up her sleeve,--why you could see
The trick done on these freezing winter nights!
While half the kisses of the Quay--
Youth, hope,-the whole enchanted string
Of dreams hung on the Seine's long line of lights."
 
Then suddenly she stripped, the very skin
Came off her soul,-a mere girl clings
Longer to some last rag, however thin,
When she has shown you-well-all sorts of things:
"If it were daylight-oh! one keeps one's head--
But fourteen years!--No one has ever guessed--
The whole thing starts when one gets to bed--
Death?-If the dead would tell us they had rest!
But your eyes held it as I stood there by the door--
One speaks to Christ-one tries to catch His garment's hem--
One hardly says as much to Him--no more:
It was not you, it was your eyes--I spoke to them."
 
She stopped like a shot bird that flutters still,
And drops, and tries to run again, and swerves.
The tale should end in some walled house upon a hill.
My eyes, at least, won't play such havoc there,--
Or hers--But she had hair!--blood dipped in gold;
And there she left me throwing back the first odd stare.
Some sort of beauty once, but turning yellow, getting old.
Pouah! These women and their nerves!
God! but the night is cold!

Fin de Fête
 
Sweetheart, for such a day
     One mustn’t grudge the score;
Here, then, it’s all to pay,
     It’s Good-night at the door.
 
Good-night and good dreams to you,—
     Do you remember the picture-book thieves
Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,
     And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?
 
So you and I should have slept,—But now,
     Oh, what a lonely head!
With just the shadow of a waving bough
     In the moonlight over your bed.

Again
 
One day, not here, you will find a hand
Stretched out to you as you walk down some heavenly street;
You will see a stranger scarred from head to feet;
But when he speaks to you you will not understand,
Nor yet who wounded him nor why his wounds are sweet.
      And saying nothing, letting go his hand,
      You will leave him in the heavenly street—
             So we shall meet!
 

 

Here Lies a Prisoner
 
 
              Leave him: he’s quiet enough: and what matter
              Out of his body or in, you can scatter
The frozen breath of his silenced soul, of his outraged soul to the winds
                             that rave:
Quieter now than he used to be, but listening still to the magpie chatter
                        Over his grave.

Ne Me Tangito
 
" This man . . . would have known who and what manner of woman this is: for she is a sinner. " — S. Luke vii. 39.
 
 
          Odd , You should fear the touch,
          The first that I was ever ready to let go,
          I, that have not cared much
For any toy I could not break and throw
To the four winds when I had done with it. You need not fear the touch,
Blindest of all the things that I have cared for very much
In the whole gay, unbearable, amazing show.
 
True — for a moment — no, dull heart, you were too small,
Thinking to hide the ugly doubt behind that hurried puzzled little smile:
Only the shade, was it, you saw? but still the shade of something vile:
          Oddest of all!
So I will tell you this. Last night, in sleep,
Walking through April fields I heard the far-off bleat of sheep
And from the trees about the farm, not very high,
A flight of pigeons fluttered up into an early evening mackerel sky.
          Someone stood by and it was you:
          About us both a great wind blew.
          My breast was bared
          But sheltered by my hair
          I found you, suddenly, lying there,
Tugging with tiny fingers at my heart, no more afraid:
          The weakest thing, the most divine
          That ever yet was mine,
          Something that I had strangely made,
          So then it seemed —
The child for which I had not looked or ever cared,
       Of whom, before, I had never dreamed.

My Heart is Lame
 
 
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,
You 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.
 

 

Absence
 

 Sometimes I know the way
     You walk, up over the bay;
It is a wind from that far sea
That blows the fragrance of your hair to me.
 
Or in this garden when the breeze
     Touches my trees
To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass
     I see you pass.
 
In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose
     Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those
Your guarded heart; as safe as they from the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.
 
          Turn never again
          On these eyes blind with a wild rain
     Your eyes; they were stars to me.—
          There are things stars may not see.
 
But call, call, and though Christ stands
     Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So
     I will come—He shall let me go!

The Trees are Down
 
                  —and he cried with a loud voice:
                   Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees—
                                                                                    (Revelation)
 
They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as
                                             they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud
                                            common laughs of the men, above it all.
 
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in
                                            the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
 
The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
   On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
             Green and high
             And lonely against the sky.
                   (Down now!—)
             And but for that,  
             If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of
                                            him again.
 
It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole
                                              of the whispering loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.
 
It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,  
             In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
             There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
             They must have heard the sparrows flying,  
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
             But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
                    ‘Hurt not the trees.’

 

Afternoon Tea
 
 
Please you, excuse me, good five-o'clock people,
       I've lost my last hatful of words,
And my heart's in the wood up above the church steeple,
       I'd rather have tea with the birds.
 
Gay Kate's stolen kisses, poor Barnaby's scars,
       John's losses and Mary's gains,
Oh! what do they matter, my dears, to the stars
       Or the glow-worms in the lanes!
 
I'd rather lie under the tall elm-trees,
       With old rooks talking loud overhead,
To watch a red squirrel run over my knees,
      Very still on my brackeny bed.
 
And wonder what feathers the wrens will be taking
       For lining their nests next Spring;
Or why the tossed shadow of boughs in a great wind shaking
       Is such a lovely thing.

A Farewell
 
Remember me and smile, as smiling too,
     I have remembered things that went their way –
     The dolls with which I grew too wise to play –
Or over-wise – kissed, as children do,
And so dismissed them; yes, even as you
     Have done with this poor piece of painted clay –
     Not wantonly, but wisely, shall we say?
As one who, haply, tunes his heart anew.
 
Only I wish her eyes may not be blue,
     The eyes of the new angel. Ah! she may
Miss something that I found, – perhaps the clue
To those long silences of yours, which grew
     Into one word. And should she not be gay,
     Poor lady! Well, she too must have her day.

Péri en Mer
(Cameret)
 
One day the friends who stand about my bed
    Will slowly turn from it to speak of me
Indulgently, as of the newly dead,
    Not knowing how I perished by the sea,
That night in summer when the gulls topped white
    The crowded masts cut black against the sky
Of fading rose--where suddenly the light
    Of youth went out, and I, no longer I,
Climbed home, the homeless ghost I was to be.
    Yet as I passed, they sped me up the heights--
Old seamen round the door of the Abri
    De la Tempête. Even on quiet nights
    So may some ship go down with all her lights
Beyond the sight of watchers on the quai!

More poems here : 

My Poetic Side

Poetry Foundation
 
English Poetry

English Verse

About her poetry and life : 

A Solo on the Pipe: On Julia Copus’s “This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew” By Declan Ryan. Los Angeles Review of Books. November 11, 2021. 

Charlotte Mew Chronology :  Charlotte's web: A Middlesex University resource spinning Charlotte Mew's life with her words.

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew review – in praise of a Victorian New Woman.  By Kathryn Hughes . The Guardian, May 19, 2021.

This Rare Spirit by Julia Copus. Faber, 2021.

Sappho’s Series of Lesbian Poets: Charlotte Mew’s Rebellious Music. By   Mary Meriam and Rita Mae Reese. MS Magazine, June 1, 2020.

Poem of the week: Not for That City by Charlotte Mew. By Carol Rumens. The Guardian, December 23, 2019.

On Val Warner
 
Val Warner obituary. By Patricia Craig. The Guardian. November 2, 2020.