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keatonmcn's review
4.0
Beautiful, aching poems with a magnificent introduction by Eavan Boland (really, read it). There’s so much yearning in Mew’s poetry; it lives in the line breaks, the declarations and exclamations, the obsession with mortality… I can’t wait to go back for a second read and discover more.
spacestationtrustfund's review
4.0
Charlotte Mew is super underrated. Not only did she lead a whirlwind life and die tragically young (attributes of the most popular poets, you may notice), she was also one hell of a writer. She would write lines like "red is the strangest pain to bear" or "I want your life and you will not give it me" or stuff like this:
Here are pieces from some of my favourites of her poems—everyone should read these:
And really, just read all of this one:
Seventeen years ago you saidand not break a sweat. Charlotte Mew was a woman who didn't understand the concept of a filler line.
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
Here are pieces from some of my favourites of her poems—everyone should read these:
I remember rooms that have had their part(From "Rooms.")
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
But first I want your life:—before I die I want to see(From "On the Road to the Sea.")
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes,
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes,
I want your life and you will not give it me.
Seventeen years ago you said(From "À quoi bon dire.")
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And really, just read all of this one:
If things are so it does not matter why:(From "The Quiet House.")
But everything has burned, and not quite through.
The colours of the world have turned
To flame, the blue, the gold has burned
In what used to be such a leaden sky.
When you are burned quite through you die.
Red is the strangest pain to bear;
In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;
In Summer the roses are worse than these,
More terrible than they are sweet:
A rose can stab you across the street
Deeper than any knife:
And the crimson haunts you everywhere—
Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair
As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.
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.
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