Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—
I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.
(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.
In the previous post, after explaining how Julia Copus’ excellent biography of Charlotte Mew had opened my eyes to the power of a poet I had never heard of before, I tried to convey how death played a huge part in Mew’s life. Now I intend to look more closely at the meaning of death for Mew and its impact on her poetry, before moving on to at least beginning to consider the equally important issue of mental health.
Death and her Poetry
Copus points out that Mew[1] ‘would return to the staircase image over and over in her poems.’ It would often ‘denote a walkway to a longed-for silence; a hint, perhaps, at the respite that death might provide.’ In one of my favourite poems, Not for that City, for example, she writes:
. . . if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space of sleep.
The image of the stair conveys also to me at least a sense of rising above the world.
Mew also toys with the question of whether consciousness survives death, and if so, in what way. The poem Requiescat[2]‘finishes by wondering whether the deceased might also… remember, in his or her turn, the things of the world; could it be that consciousness remains alive in the world, after the body has left?’ The closing stanza captures this vividly:
Beyond the line of naked trees
At the road’s end, your stretch of blue –
Strange if you should remember these
As we, ah! God! remember you!
There is, I feel, even more doubt about that possibility in Charlotte’s mind, than Copus’ wording suggests.
To someone who came to believe in survival after death after two decades of dogmatic disbelief, I don’t agree with Copus’ sense that what she calls Mew’s ‘central premise’ in the poem is strange. What’s so odd about entertaining the idea that:[3]‘consciousness might continue its daily existence after death, might remember physical experience – and even go on engaging in some way with the earth’s seasonal rhythms’? A sense of this appears in other poems as well. In Here Lies a Prisoner Mew describes the dead man as ‘listening still to the magpie chatter/Over his grave.’ There are though moments when the opposite seems to be implied as in the last line of The Quiet House: ‘I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!’ Mew’s article on Emily Brontë conveys a similar perspective:[4] ‘[Death] was not a problem, because it was the end problems.’
According to Copus, Mew does repeat[5] the ‘conviction’ that ‘in the natural world at least – after death comes renewal.’ More of that when I look at the nature poems.
In the end, Copus is clear in her own mind that Mew holds onto something almost the opposite of a force for life as not just a destination but a welcome escape:[6] In ‘Moorland Night’ the Thing that is found . . . ‘is the final, blissful cessation of all life’s human concerns, a melting away of boundaries, a yielding to the larger cycle of life.’ Our sense of a separate identity melts back into this cycle like drops of rain blend into a stream. For her, Copus feels[7] ‘the only thing that mattered was the here and now.’ There is no gateway to an afterlife.
I am not sure I quite buy into something as simplistic. There are powerful lines that complicate the picture. For example, these from The Call:
The world is cold without
And dark and hedged about
With mystery and enmity and doubt,
But we must go
Though yet we do not know
Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow.
There are certainly strong reasons for believing that, for Mew, what she most values is transient. In Moorland Night she calls this ‘the Thing,’ which she doesn’t define but explains ‘Perhaps the earth will hold it, or the wind, or that bird’s cry,/But it is not for long in any life I know.’
Penelope Fitzgerald[8] feels that Mew’s take on death is similar to that of Alfred Noyes’s who ‘finds he is beginning to doubt doubt and disbelieve in disbelief.’
Whatever her beliefs about an afterlife or some kind of continuing consciousness, there is no doubt that Mew’s familiarity with the pain of loss often crept into her poems. Take To a Child in Death as an example, written 30 years after two deaths in 1897. As Penelope Fitzgerald describes it in her biography,[9] Mew poses a ‘wretched question from the suddenly left alone – “What shall we do with this strange summer, meant for you?”’ She spoke of her childhood as ‘a time of intense, but lost, happiness.’
Mental Health:
Death was not the only source of distress and loss in her life. As she saw it, her family was tainted with the stigma of mental illness, something which impacted on her life in more ways than one.
Her brother, Henry[10] ‘was experiencing full blown delusions’ by June 1884. He was admitted[11] to ‘London’s most notorious asylum,’ the New Bethlem Hospital on 14 June that same year. Copus is clear that Charlotte would have seen herself as also tainted with the same genetic flaw. The diagnosis he was given[12] was of ‘acute mania with excitement and impulsiveness’.
In those days a family such as hers would have not wished this to be known to anyone else. Charlotte would have gone to great lengths to keep it quiet. There is no reference to him[13] ‘in any of her surviving letters,’ though ‘his presence haunts her poetry.’ She was also plagued by ‘the fear that the same thing might happen to her and to her sisters.’ Copus[14] describes her as ‘standing sentinel to a secret that was not to be carried outside its walls at any cost.’
There were other costs to the family. Instead of generating income[15] Henry ‘had become a steady drain on the family coffers.’ Copus is clear that[16] the family ‘were resentful of the amount of money’ their father spent on Henry’s care, ‘or became so as the years passed.’ After he died, they took steps[17] to arrange for Henry to be ‘discharged “uncured” from Holloway Sanatorium and transferred to Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, which took in both paupers and private patients, for whom the institution advertised ‘moderate terms’.” Instead of sending their sister, Freda,[18] ‘back to London, arrangements were made for her admission to a local nursing home called The Limes, on the High Street in nearby Newport [Isle of Wight].’ After a suicide attempt in January 1899,[19] Freda ‘was admitted to the private wing of the nearby county asylum, Whitecroft Hospital.’ Freda[20] ‘never did recover her sanity’ and she remained ‘in the asylum for the rest of her long life.’
Sadly,[21] on 22 March 1901, ‘just three and a half years after entering Peckham House Lunatic Asylum, Henry Herne Mew died there, of tuberculosis.’ It is likely that Charlotte, in particular, may have felt guilty ‘over the fact that Henry had caught the infection since his move to Peckham House, which took in paupers alongside private patients.’
An additional emotionally damaging cost in the longer term was Charlotte’s, and her sister Anne’s resolve[22] ‘that the door of marriage should be closed to them: given the severity of Henry’s illness, they believed it would be irresponsible to bring children of their own into the world.’ They feared ‘passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity.’
Fitzgerald clarifies exactly why this was:[23]
As ill-fortune would have it, the breakdown first of Henry, and then of Freda, coincided with the years when the science or apparent science of eugenics first took the field… Eugenics… [set] out to show that transmission of this inheritance led to the gradual degeneration of the whole society.… if any member of your family was different, no matter in what way, you were morally bound not to reproduce.
This seems a good place to pause and, using a diagram, give some pointers to where the sequence will be going from here.
As I see it, the impact of deaths and mental health problems in the family combined to give Charlotte a high degree of empathy, particularly with those on the edges of society – outsiders and misfits – with whom she strongly identified. Her empathy clearly extended to nature, though the reasons for that are less clear.
The results are on the one hand to create poems, written in the form of a dramatic monologue, giving powerful voice to those who are all too often ignored, and on the other moving testimony to her strong identification with aspects of the natural world, even to the extent of capturing, at times, what she conveys as a kind of consciousness.
More of that next time.
Everybody Means Something 