Poetess of Haunted Joy:
FARRAR, MICHEL
Poetess of Haunted Joy Collected Poems. By Charlotte Mew. Macmillan. 80 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by Michel Farrar Assistant Editor, Hermitage House WHEN Charlotte Mew died, a suicide, at 60 in...
...If there were fifty heavens, God could not give us back the child that went or never came...
...Fastidious and sparse, Miss Mew's collected work comprises only sixty lyrical and lyrico-dramatic pieces haunting in their musical evocations...
...This poet of "haunted joy and enchanted pain" is a choice spirit and one of the rare ornaments of modern English verse...
...I'd rather kneel than over there, in open day, Where Christ is hanging, rather pray To something more like my own clay, Not too divine...
...Here, not in heavenly hereafters, soon, I want your smile this very afternoon...
...Dominating all is her love for the sea...
...The myriad sea-images take on the significance of a controlling, obsessive, personal symbol...
...In Charlotte Mew's poems there are no self-conscious gestures...
...One cannot easily forget such magnificent poems as "The Trees Are Down," the impassioned "On the Road to the Sea," the secret-haunted "The Moorland Night," that moving monologue "The Farmer's Bride," the touchingly-tender portrait called "Ken," and such pieces as "Sea Love,' "I Have Been Through the Gates," "The Quiet House," "She Was a Sinner," "To a Child in Death," "Beside the Bed," and the ambitious "Madeleine in Church,' one of Miss Mew's largest and most effectively rounded dramatic impersonations...
...Her lyrics, taut, intense and tight-packed, attain a high spiritual dignity and quiet nobility...
...There are swiftly-etched portraits of children, of halfwits, of village oddities, a poignant sketch of a public insane asylum, and several poems on the destruction of trees...
...But her withdrawn existence neither blunted her sensibilities nor atrophied her sympathy for human values...
...The pathos is genuine, the thought always searching and sincere...
...Adept in the art of conciseness, Miss Mew was an admirable craftsman, skilfully fusing meter and matter and casting her poems in unique stanzaic arrangements and fresh rhyme-schemes...
...In these days of overwrought writing and obscurity, it is a pleasure to encounter a body of poetry so scrupulously considered, so clearly communicative, and so firmly produced...
...In this sense, she resembles the inventive George Herbert...
...Happily, some of the hardships of her declining years were mitigated by the Civil List Pension which she was awarded in 1922 through the sponsorship of Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare...
...Reviewed by Michel Farrar Assistant Editor, Hermitage House WHEN Charlotte Mew died, a suicide, at 60 in 1929, she had published one thin book of poems, a pamphlet-sized volume which immediately established her singularity and distinction...
...Impervious to the literary fads of her time—only the influence of Hardy is perceptible in her dramatic condensations—she forged her poems at her own anvil and shaped a sharply distinctive idiom...
...Unlike Christina Rossetti, who sought comfort in her otherworldliness, Charlotte Mew found release in reality and wrung tortured beauty out of the tragic here-and-now...
...Known to a select circle of poets and to a few discriminating readers, this reticent Englishwoman won the enduring admiration of Thomas Hardy, who deemed her the best woman poet of her time...
...Among her many technical accomplishments is her manipulation of long, supple lines—lines of unusual length followed by short, stabbing cadences stinging in their electric impact...
...Her work is indeed, as Marianne Moore suggests, "beyond praise...
...Dogged by poverty, harrowed by harsh circumstances and plagued by fear of the insanity prevalent in her family, Charlotte Mew found refuge in the life of a virtual recluse...
...Here clear insight informs a direct, lucid speech...
...Frost's memorable lines, "Earth's the right place for love/ I don't know where it's likely to go better," might have served as the epigraph for her collected poems, for she underscored this theme in more than a handful of lyrics: "Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this...
...Miss Mew wrote of an ill-starred love affair, of spiritual struggle, of the seasonal changes and beauties of the English countryside, of northern France and her memories of Paris...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 39
