Charlotte Mew - Approaches to Love (1869-1928)

Charlotte Mew was a gifted poet who died by her own hand at the age of 59; she appears to  have spent her life in poverty and despair.  They didn't have Prozac back then. Perhaps, if they had, Mew might have had the self confidence to write even more poetry. On the other hand, perhaps she would have produced nothing at all and would have lived a happier life. As it was, she left quite a large body of work and gained some degree of recognition from literary figures like Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf. However, she has now faded into undeserved obscurity.

Judging by the OldPoetry selections from Charlotte Mew, love was an important theme for her so I will concentrate on her love poetry and on her various ways of approaching love in her work.

The theme of poverty is one that interests me as well but I have not yet determined whether Mew's poverty affected her work.  Of necessity, my study of her poems will be brief but I may treat poverty a secondary theme.

I have chosen to study the following poems:

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 things we passed?
Perhaps today?

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.

She sums up this unsatisfactory situation quite well but can't translate her self awareness into action.  There are signs that the lover is indifferent to the poet (Is Charlotte writing about herself or fictionalizing?) Or perhaps the man or woman she is pursuing  actively dislikes her.  The poet is aware of these feelings. "When you could bear my touch", she writes.  However, she persists in her attentions to the lover. It's obviously not an equal sort of relationship.  They are not compatible and Charlotte (it feels like it is her rather than a made-up narrator) has to adapt in an unhealthy, desperate sort of way.  "Perhaps today" she says tentatively.  Are they actually lovers or does Charlotte just want the other person to be her lover?  If so, her desire is just a bit too desperate. "You for a moment giving me your eyes/When you could bear my touch."

Charlotte knows it's not really working out and she depict the other person overly capricious, someone who is leading her on. That's one possibility.  Maybe the other person is just very distant and comes across as cold.  Charlotte obviously wants more and, though I am starting to made the poem sound like a Harlequin romance, I find the situation and the poem itself moving and expressed in a unique and precise sort of way.  Charlotte is at least able to get a poem out of the situation.

Charlotte gives up for now.  "But not tomorrow.  This has taken all my breath."  They may actually be walking together or perhaps the walk is an extended metaphor for their relationship.  Charlotte may have decided to cool her feelings down Is this person too cold for her?  On the other hand she may find coldness attractive. 

I do hope that this attempt at analysis does not prevent people from reading the poem for its beauty.  It can be read simply for the beauty of its language "My heart is lame" -- what a striking image that is and so descriptive of the sufferings of blighted love.

A Quoi Bon Dire

The love depicted in this poem is a happier one than in My Heart is Lame. Charlotte muses upon the memory of a young love, probably an innocent love.  It's such a  beautiful poem that I will not attempt major dissection but I urge you to read it for yourselves.  This past love has left the poet regretful but only because of the passing of time.  That is not a small thing of course but this particular lost love has not left her bitter or damaged her. 

I So Liked Spring

"I'll not think of Yyu," says Charlotte.  It's a reticent, private sort of way of saying that things with the loved one have not gone well since the previous spring.  But she still enjoys the spring, even though she is now enjoying it on her own.

The Farmers Bride

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/9027-Charlotte--Mary-Mew-The-Farmer-s-Bride

In this poem, Charolette chooses the same theme of incompatibility in relationships  but it is quite different from the relationship in the other Mew poems I have studied.  It is told through the eyes of a farmer recently married to a somewhat younger woman whose unhappiness leads her to run away at one point.  The theme of lovers trying to escape runs through the Mew poems I have studied.  The bride is found and brought back but she retreats completely from her husband preferring the company of the farm animals.  The farmer admires her beauty and her fay quality but does not know how to reach her.  In this poem, the theme of unsuited lovers is depicted very movingly by the husband but he seems afraid to reach out to his wife Though she must have been totally unsuited to the life of a farmwife, he doesn't seem to hold that against her.  Instead he is somewhat in awe of the qualities that make her unfit for that life.

On the Road to the Sea - "I want your life and you will not give it me."  There is something overbearing about the way Charlotte expresses this feeling.  She invests a lot of herself in these unsatisfactory relationships.  I got the feeling that any lover who accepted her might have to surrender his or her privacy.  "I would have liked (so vile we are) to have taught you tears/But most to have made you smile." Although the end of the poem exults in having finally got a smile out of the reluctant lover, this one seems the most remote of all the remote lovers I encountered in the poetry of Charlotte Mew.  Charlotte admits to "not having spent with you one day."  Does she really want a lover at all or is fulfillment in love just a dream for her?

In the Mew poems I have read, I have not been able to find any indication that Charlotte was defeated by her poverty.  She doesn't seem to have written about it, even though poverty certainly would have provided a lot of material.  It is love that absorbs her, love of the unrequited variety.  But she writes about it with tremendous skill and beauty.