Poem of the week – Room by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew was a largely neglected literary figure in her own life time. She wrote through the twilight of the Victorian era towards the dawn of Modernism and is often deemed a proto-modernist, but her subtle originality and mesmerising unorthodoxy regularly defies a critical instinct to categories.

In the 1970s, fresh collections of her work were published and a new generation of readers began to appreciate the lyrical agility and graceful phrasing that distinguishes her work. Praised by Thomas Hardy as “the best woman poet of the day”, Mew enjoyed the patronage of several prominent writers but failed to achieve substantial fame outside London literary circles.

This week’s poem is Rooms. It is about incarceration. The rooms she describes are prisons. The living figures trapped in these spaces rehearse the repose of death by lying on beds, indifferent to the day ahead. The lilt of intimacy, evident throughout her oeuvre, gives an almost whispering effect to the strange but simple rhyming scheme she deploys. In death she recognised a liberation from the restraints of life, a sentiment someone with suicidal tendencies like Mew would notice. She unfortunately pursued that morbid proclivity alluded to in this poem and took her own life in 1928.

Rooms reminds me of a stanza from a longer poem by May Sarton: “I am not ready to die,/But I am learning to trust death/As I have trusted life./I am moving/Toward a new freedom.” This week’s poem may not be steeped in optimism, but it does extol a happy reliance on love and liberty, lays a quiet emphasis on acceptance and cautions the reader to be aware how a place of shelter can suddenly transform into a corner of confinement. Suicidal or not, after a year of being inside, it’s a feeling we can all appreciate.

Rooms

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,
& that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake & might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.