Loss and Silence: Mew and Jennings

Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings are among the most underrated English poets of the twentieth century. Both write about love in its diminished states — love that cannot be spoken, love that has dwindled into habit, love that exists in the gap between what is felt and what can be expressed. Their poems are studies in emotional restraint, and they reward the kind of patient, attentive close reading that A-Level examiners value most highly.

---

Charlotte Mew: "A quoi bon dire"

Context (AO3)

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) lived a life marked by repression, loss, and mental illness. Two of her siblings were committed to asylums, and Mew and her sister Anne made a pact never to marry for fear of passing on hereditary mental instability. Mew was almost certainly lesbian, living at a time when female homosexuality was socially invisible — not even acknowledged as a possibility by most of her contemporaries. Unlike male homosexuality, which was criminalised under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, female same-sex desire simply did not exist in the legal or cultural imagination.

The poem's French title — "A quoi bon dire" — translates as "What is the point of speaking?" or "Why bother saying it?" The use of French is itself significant: French was the language of sophistication and worldliness, but also of emotional directness that English reserve found difficult. The title announces the poem's central preoccupation: the inadequacy and futility of language in the face of unreciprocated or unspeakable love.

Form and Structure

The poem is strikingly short — just three stanzas of four lines each, with an ABAB rhyme scheme. The brevity is itself expressive: this is a poem about what cannot be said, and it enacts that silence through its own compression. Every word carries immense weight precisely because there are so few of them.

Close Analysis

The opening lines — "Seventeen years ago you said / Something that sounded like Good-bye" — establish the poem's temporal framework immediately. "Seventeen years" is devastatingly specific: this is not a vague memory but a wound that has been precisely counted. The speaker has been marking time since this moment of loss.

The phrase "Something that sounded like Good-bye" is masterfully ambiguous. The farewell was not explicit — it only "sounded like" a goodbye. This ambiguity is the source of the speaker's suffering: because the departure was never clearly articulated, the speaker has been unable to achieve closure. The relationship exists in a liminal space between presence and absence, between something and nothing.

The second stanza intensifies the pain: "And ever since then, you talk and smile, / And turn your head aside." The beloved is still present — still physically proximate — but emotionally absent. The verbs "talk and smile" suggest social performance: the beloved goes through the motions of interaction without genuine engagement. The crucial gesture is "turn your head aside" — a physical turning away that symbolises emotional withdrawal. The beloved cannot or will not make eye contact; the intimacy of the gaze is refused.

The final stanza delivers the poem's devastating conclusion: "I have been trying to talk, / As one who has not got a word to say." The speaker's attempt at communication is rendered futile by the impossibility of expressing what she feels. The image of someone trying to speak without words is profoundly moving — it captures the experience of love that has no legitimate form of expression, whether because of social prohibition (Mew's lesbianism), unrequited feeling, or the simple failure of language to capture emotional reality.

Different Interpretations (AO5)

• Biographical/queer reading: The poem can be read as an expression of lesbian desire in a society that offered no language for such desire. The "Good-bye" may represent the beloved's retreat into heterosexual convention — marriage, perhaps — leaving Mew stranded in an emotion she cannot name.
• Universal reading: The poem transcends biographical specifics to capture a universal experience: the agony of loving someone who is present but emotionally unreachable. The "seventeen years" of silent suffering will resonate with anyone who has experienced unrequited love.
• Linguistic/philosophical reading: The poem is fundamentally about the limits of language itself. Love — particularly love that falls outside social norms — exposes the inadequacy of words. The French title reinforces this: even switching languages cannot bridge the communicative gap.

---

Elizabeth Jennings: "One Flesh"

Context (AO3)

Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) was the only female member of The Movement, a loose grouping of English poets in the 1950s that included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and Thom Gunn. Movement poets reacted against the perceived excesses of 1940s Neo-Romanticism, favouring clarity, restraint, traditional forms, and honest engagement with ordinary experience.

Jennings was also a devout Roman Catholic, and her faith profoundly shaped her poetry. The title "One Flesh" alludes to Genesis 2:24 — "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" — and to Christ's reaffirmation of this principle in Matthew 19:5–6: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." The poem examines what happens when the spiritual ideal of marital unity collides with the physical reality of ageing and emotional distance.