What can You know, what can You really see
Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!
(From Madeleine in Church)
Given that my recent sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet. Though she was not a believer she struggled with deep spiritual issues in places.
This is not going to be a coolly objective consideration of Charlotte Mew as a poet. Far from it. The feeling I had as I read and re-read her best poems, after discovering them for the very first time barely three weeks before writing these words, was as intense and deep as when I discovered Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth in my adolescence. I’m afraid this is going to be more of an exploration of what it is about her poems that has triggered such a strong reaction.
I would say that she is probably the only English poet, writing in the 20th Century, to produce such a powerful effect on me. There are many writers of English poetry of the modern period I have very much enjoyed and been moved by – Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Jennings and U. A. Fanthorpe to name but a few – and some who have intrigued me a great deal including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, R. S. and Dylan Thomas and Derek Walcott for example – but they did not stir me to the same depths as she is doing, with the possible exception of Thomas Hardy, who also admired her poetry.
So, why is that the case?
Apart from making clear that Julia Copus was such an eloquent advocate for the poet in her biography that there was never any doubt that I would immediately order a copy of Mew’s poems in the Faber 2019 edition, there are a number of other considerations, not least of which is that there are in that book a higher proportion of poems than usual that contain lines that touch me deeply. So much so that I am careful about reading them aloud to anyone as I tend to be drawn over the edge of tears as I do so. (Interestingly, this is not the case when I am alone, which suggests that I become more identified with what the poem is saying when I read it out loud to someone else.) Mew’s own assessment is intriguing here:[1] ‘All verse gains by being spoken, and mine particularly – I suppose because it’s rough.’
What else?
My first strong connection with Mew is through the themes she chooses to explore. There are three that map closely onto my constant preoccupations – I was going to say obsessions but decided that would be unnecessarily disparaging the intensity of my enduring interest in them.
The three themes are death, ‘mental illness’ (as she would have perhaps described it in contemporary terms that I am not entirely comfortable with, but more of that later) and the natural world. A quality she consistently exhibits, which gives her treatment of these themes a special power, is the depth of her empathy, her interest in and intense compassion not just for people, even those who are very different from her in what seems a challenging way, but for all forms of life.
Readers of my blog will be well aware of how often I have drawn on these themes myself. My childhood was stained with the dye of my sister’s death. My calling, after I discovered it in the mid-70s, was to work with those who had been labelled ‘mentally ill.’ And from childhood I had felt a deep connection with nature, especially trees.
The second strong attraction, which runs across all those themes, is her poetry as a combination of power, accessibility and music, through which she conveys her various perspectives (I use that term in the plural advisably – her use of the dramatic monologue makes that necessary).
Again I have emphasised and explored the importance for me of intelligible music as a key ingredient of a successful poem. So no surprise that Mew’s poems should resonate with me so strongly.
What I think I need to explore now is both the reason for her attraction to these themes and the power with which her poems convey aspects of her experience of them.
Let’s start with what looks more like an ending – death.
Death:
Death impacted early on her life, and far more directly than it ever did on mine, and this accounts for the relatively far greater intensity of her response to it:[2] ‘By the age of seven, she had witnessed two deaths in the family, and was already learning to find solace in the world of words.’ She may not have seen the corpse of her brother, Richard, but ‘the shock of [his] death was to stay with her for life.’ His was ‘the first major trauma she encountered, and it set a pattern for life.’ These ‘absences’ may have helped induce ‘her growing detachment from the world.’
Decades later, as she put it, her mother’s death left her[3] ‘feeling . . . as useless as a “weed”, rooted out of the earth and tossed aside.’
Her father died of stomach cancer in the autumn of 1898 at the age of 65, just over four years after the probable start of his symptoms, which would have coincided with her first publication, a short story in The Yellow Book in the spring of 1894.[4] Penelope Fitzgerald flags up that[5] ‘[t]he certificate shows that Charlotte was with him at the end, and witnessed the death.’ It is almost certain that she would have been the family member to step into his shoes as the lynchpin of the household.[6]
For various reasons, which will become clearer when I begin to deal later with the mental health issues, this was going to be no easy task.
Suffice it to say at this point that, for long periods of time – in the case of her sister Freda many decades – there were two members of the family in two different asylums. Not long after her father’s death,[7] ‘[o]n Friday 22 March 1901, just three and a half years after entering Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, Henry Herne Mew died there [at the age of 36], of tuberculosis.’ A complicating factor for Charlotte may have been ‘some guilt over the fact that Henry had caught the infection since his move to Peckham House, which took in paupers alongside private patients,’ a move from his original more expensive asylum, that she and her family instigated to reduce the costs of his original care that her father had insisted on incurring since 1884.
The final group of deaths came much later, starting with her mother in May 1923: both daughters were with her when she died:[8] ‘Ma had been with Charlotte and Anne almost every day of their lives, and for all her faults, her daughters had loved her deeply, as she had loved them.’ The impact was considerable:[9]
Over the years she had devoted an increasing proportion of her time to caring for her mother and, relieved so suddenly of the responsibility, she felt not only uprooted but superfluous.
As a result her sister, Anne,[10] ‘in many ways, became the “significant other” in Charlotte’s life as the years rolled by and their shared cargo in griefs and privations accumulated.’
To have her sister die in 1927 at the age of 53, only four years after their mother, of cancer of the uterus and liver, left Charlotte[11] ‘inconsolable, unable to sleep.’ She had nursed her alone in what was effectively a bedsit. Copus explains its full impact, linked to what they had felt was their shameful secret that no one else must ever know (more of that later):
Perhaps most distressing of all, Charlotte had lost the last person in the world with whom she shared the full secret of Henry’s and Freda’s illnesses; the one person with whom she could speak openly about them, as often as she liked, without shame or fear of reproof.
It is completely understandable that life should have lost all its meaning for her at this desperate point. She was never married, for reasons I’ll be exploring more fully later, and therefore had no children. Her birth family was everything to her.
On the 24th March 1928 she overdosed on Lysol, a commonly available disinfectant at the time, which had been used in 361 suicides in 1927.[12] At such a dark moment in her life suicide would almost certainly have made complete sense to her, given her perception of death as a friend who would bring her peace: her words to death in her poem Smile Death were, ‘Show me your face, why your eyes are kind!’
There was a bitterly ironic effect of the poison:[13]
One of the features of Lysol suicide that Charlotte would not have read about is that the inside of the mouth – the pharynx and the larynx – is eventually burnt away. For a writer whose poems speak with such unrestrained fluency, there is something particularly bleak about this final, physical silencing.
Next time I plan to look more closely at the meaning of death for Mew and its impact on her poetry, before moving on to consider the equally important issue of mental health.
References:
[1]. Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of Charlotte Mew – page 126.
[2]. Copus – pages 16-17.
[3]. Copus – page 24.
[4]. Copus – page 93.
[5]. Fitzgerald – page 68.
[6]. Copus – page 125.
[7]. Copus – page 136.
[8]. Copus – pages 328-29.
[9]. Copus – page 333.
[10]. Copus – pages 345-46.
[11]. Copus – pages 363-69.
[12]. Copus – page 378.
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