. . . . joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.
(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.
We move now from the nature poems of the previous post in this sequence to Mew’s dramatic lyrics.
My taste for the dramatic monologue goes back a long way – at least to the fourth year at secondary school when Tommy Turner, the improbably charismatic teacher of English I described in a recent sequence, hooked me on Browning’s poetry.
It even clinched my sense that U A Fanthorpe was a decent poet worth reading when I got as far as her moving dramatic monologue in the voice of William Tyndale, whose early translations provide the foundations of the King James version of the Bible. Though elsewhere she mercilessly mocks superstitious and self-righteous piety along with other unappealing frailties, her ability to identify with deep and compassionate spirituality in even the most distant places is uncanny, as this poem proves.The words are spoken as he sits in his cold and candleless ‘palatial jail’ as ‘the Emperor’s guest’:[1]
But I watch too,
As once I stood on Nibley Knoll and looked
Out over moody Severn across the Forest
To the strangeness of Wales, Malvern’s blue bony hills,
And down on the dear preoccupied people
Inching along to Gloucester, the trows with their sopping decks
Running from Bristol with the weather behind them
And none of them knowing God’s meaning, what He said to them,
Save filtered through bookish lips that never learnt
To splice a rope or fill a bucket. So I watched,
And saw the souls on the road, the souls on the river,
Were the ones Jesus loved. I saw that. Now I see
The landscape of my life, and how that seeing
Has brought me to this place, and what comes after.
Because religious persecution is still part of our lived experience, this poem is deeply moving. The reinforcement of this priceless gem triggered this comment in the margin: ‘I almost gave up before I got to this magnificent sequence.’
Why so challenging?
Even given this familiarity with the dramatic monologue as a form of poetry that integrates consciousness, character, and narrative, this post is going to be the most challenging of this sequence for a number of reasons.
First of all, there is so much I could say, her dramatic monologues cover so much ground. Then there is the fact that I am not sure I can find words to convey the impact of her greatest poems, they work on so many levels. On top of that so many of her themes map onto the preoccupations of my lifetime – death, mental health issues, loss, and faith, or in my earlier days, the lack of it – just to name the obvious.
There’s an interesting caveat to share at this point, I feel. There is no poet anywhere who writes great poetry all the time, not even Shakespeare as Paterson’s commentary on his sonnets indicates. As Randall Jarrell put it, ‘a good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.’
I’ve tested this myself not just with the poems of Fanthorpe mentioned above but also with the likes of Yeats, Keats, Herbert, Marvell and Larkin. In each set of complete poems I only highlight a relatively small number. In Mew’s Selected Poetry and Prose I have highlighted 20 poems out of 50 (40%). Compare to this Larkin, for example, in whose Collected Poems I have so far highlighted 29 out of 244 (12%). Admittedly if Mew has written as much and I had the collected poems the figures would have been closer, but she’s clearly made a strong impression on me.
Perhaps one of the best ways of describing the impact that Mew’s dramatic monologues make is to say that she seems to do in poetry what Alice Neel did in her art. Her history of grief, loss and the stigma of a family with the taint of ‘insanity,’ along with her sense of always being an outsider, empowered her sense of empathy with the outcasts of society, just as Neel’s inscape helped her connect in a similar way with those society had in some way left behind. Empathy allied with a degree of projection fuelled the power of the poems. As Copus expresses it in her introduction to the Selected Poetry and Prose:[2] ‘It is no mistake that she wrote so many dramatic monologues: the genre is the perfect vehicle for the lonely cast of souls she brought into being.’ In her way she was a ‘collector of souls’ just as Neel was.
Reading Mew and feeling so drawn into the poems is making me realise that one of my favourite forms may in fact perhaps be better described as the dramatic lyric, as one critic terms the form she often uses. Dramatic monologues can sometimes lack the music that I also need along with the psychological insights and narrative element. Combining psychological interest, story and song makes this form of poetry perfect for me. I love many other forms of lyric as well, but this probably takes the prize. Mew is definitely in her unique way the Alice Neel of poetry.
What is also interesting, but perhaps not hugely significant is that, like Browning, as I pointed out in an earlier sequence, who had a public persona very different from the characters captured in his dramatic monologues, the same split was to some extent true of Charlotte Mew. Penelope Fitzgerald summarises it in her case by saying:[3] ‘There is pathos in this clinging to gentility by a free spirit, who seemed born to have nothing to do with it.’ After an uncomfortable trip to France it even extended to friends who were close to her:[4] ‘she was usually careful to present an edited version herself to those who were fond of her.’ I’m not arguing that such a split is necessary for a poet who wants to excel in the dramatic monologue, but in both Browning’s and Mew’s cases the hidden and possibly disreputable self seems to inspire the poems.
Which Poems?
So, which poems shall I choose to prove my point? ‘There’s the rub’, to borrow a phrase from the Bard.
It’s tempting to go with a safe bet like The Farmer’s Bride. While telling the story from the frustrated husband farmer’s point of view we still can empathise with his evasive bride. Copus again pins down one of the crucial qualities of this poem:[5] ‘[I]n her best known poem, The Farmer’s Bride, we encounter Mew’s uncanny facility for viewing both sides of a difficult situation with equal compassion, and for presenting them to us in such a way that simplistic notions of right and wrong become meaningless.’
My feeling, though, is to go with poems that are even less well-known.
The Quiet House was tempting. It combines, as her poems often do, simplicity with perplexity, so it would be good illustration in that sense. It opens very simply:
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.
Only later in the poem do things become more puzzling, and continue so over several stanzas, of which I quote the shortest:
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.
Copus helps by explaining in the notes to this poem[6] that ‘the colour red is used throughout [her] poetry to denote passion and the fullness of life.’ Even more interestingly she adds: ‘Mew expresses the idea that there is a price to pay for profound sensory experience, and that joy is never entirely divorced from pain.’ For me this resonates so closely with Bob Dylan when he sings ‘Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain (from Not Dark Yet), and with the same quality I sensed in Alice Neel’s paintings.
In the end though, powerful as it is, it seemed too close to her own life to qualify as a perfect example of her use of the dramatic monologue. Family members are simply transpositions of her own family – for example, her father died not her mother, and the parallels are therefore very close.
Now for something much darker and more demanding in the next and final post.
Footnotes
[1]. Fanthorpe: New & Collected Poems – page 296.
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