I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart:
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide -
Rooms where for good or ill - things died.

(from 'Rooms')

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was admired by writers as diverse as Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas; Thomas Hardy called her 'the best living woman poet'. For decades after her suicide she was known only by a few anthology pieces. Now she is again widely recognised as a true original. Her writing has an urgency and passion that compel her to re-invent forms and prosodies to explore her complex pains and loves.

This collection reveals the full range of her work. She can be appreciated as a bravely experimental modernist, a poet of formal precision whose themes are at the heart of feminist concerns.

Val Warner's introduction provides background to Mew's life, shared with her painter sister, caring for their mother, concealing the mental illness of her brother and her other sister and her own ambivalent sexual nature. From such constraints she created powerful poetry.

Table of Contents

Contents







Introduction



A Note on the Text



Editions and Further Reading







Poems

The Farmer's Bride (1916)

The Farmer's Bride

Fame

The Narrow Door

The Féte

Beside the Bed

In Nunhead Cemetery

The Pedlar

Pécheresse

The Changeling

Ken

A quoi bon dire

The Quiet House

On the Asylum Road

Jour des Morts (Cimetiére Montparnasse)

The Forest Road

Madeleine in Church

Exspecto Resurrectionem



Additional poems included

In The Farmer's Bride , 1921 edition

On the Road to the Sea

The Sunlit House

The Shade-Catchers

Le sacré-Coeur (Montmartre)

Song

Saturday Market

Arracombe Wood

Sea Love

The Road to Kérity

I Have Been Through the Gates

The Cenotaph

The Rambling Sailor (1929)

In the Fields

From a Window

Not for that City

Rooms

Monsieur qui passé (Quai Voltaire)

Do Dreams Lie Deeper?

Domus Caedet Arborem

Fin de féte

Again

Epitaph

Friend, Wherefore -?

I so liked Spring

Here lies a Prisoner

May, 1915

June, 1915

Ne me tangito

Old Shepherd's Prayer

My Heart is Lame

On Youth Struck Down

The trees are Down

Smile, Death

The Rambling Sailor

The Call

Absence

To a Child in Death

Moorland Night



Early poems printed at the end

Of The Rambling Sailor

At the Convent Gate

Requiescat

The Little Portress (St Gilda de Rhuys)

Afternoon Tea

She was a Sinner

Song



Poems collected or published posthumously

An Ending

A Question

Left Behind

A Farewell

'There shall be no night there (In the Fields)

V.R.I.

To a Little Child in Death

Péri en mer (Camaret)



Selected Prose

Stories

Elinor

The Minnow Fishers

The Wheat

Essay

An Old Servant

Play

The China Bowl