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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.
Paper 1, Love Through the Ages: poetry (post-1900). These two poems are natural comparison partners and also lend themselves to the wider cross-period comparison the paper demands — Mew's poem of constancy beyond death reaches back to the metaphysical and Victorian elegiac tradition, and Jennings's poem of marital estrangement can be set against pre-1900 marriage and love poetry. The dominant objectives here are:
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 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 Labouchère Amendment, female same-sex desire simply had no place in the legal or cultural imagination of the period; there was, quite literally, no public language for it.
The poem's French title — "À quoi bon dire" — translates as "What good is there in speaking?" or "Why bother saying it?" The use of French is itself significant: French was the language of sophistication and of an emotional directness that English reserve found difficult. The title announces the poem's central preoccupation: the inadequacy — or pointlessness — of speech in the face of a love that cannot be openly acknowledged. The poem was published in Mew's 1916 collection The Farmer's Bride, and it is in the public domain.
Mew is sometimes placed at the hinge between the Victorian and the modern, and this poem shows why. In its subject — constancy beyond death — it looks back to the Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite elegy; in its technique — the broken line, the colloquial swerve, the refusal of consolatory rhetoric — it looks forward to modernism. Thomas Hardy, who admired Mew greatly and called her the best woman poet of her day, recognised in her exactly this doubleness: a poet steeped in the older tradition of love and loss who nonetheless wrote with a spare, modern, speaking voice. The reticence of the poem is also, in part, the reticence of its period: in the social world of the 1900s and 1910s, strong feeling — especially feeling that could not be named — was characteristically managed through understatement, indirection, and the things politely left unsaid, and Mew turns that cultural restraint into a deliberate poetic resource.
The poem is strikingly short — three short stanzas, thirteen lines in all, rhyming on alternate lines and famously dropping, at the close of the first two stanzas, to a single arrested foot. The brevity is itself expressive: this is a poem about what cannot or need not be said, and it enacts that silence through its own compression. The form turns on a series of one-word or two-word swerves — But, But you — that pivot the whole sense of a stanza on the smallest possible hinge, so that the most weight falls on the fewest syllables.
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 span that has been precisely counted, a wound numbered to the year. The speaker has been keeping time since the moment of loss.
The phrase "Something that sounded like Good-bye" is masterfully ambiguous. The farewell was never explicit; it only "sounded like" a goodbye, and the capitalised "Good-bye" makes the word itself an object held at a slight, uncertain distance. Because the parting was never clearly articulated, the bond was never definitively severed — and that uncertainty is the ground on which the poem's strange constancy is built.
The first stanza then delivers the swerve that defines the poem: "And everybody thinks that you are dead, / But I." The whole world has written the beloved off as dead; the two-word line "But I" stands alone against that consensus, the speaker's private, unkillable faith compressed into a single iambic foot. The brevity is the meaning: against "everybody" the speaker has only herself, and the line is as short and solitary as her conviction.
The second stanza mirrors the first with quiet symmetry: "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." Now it is the speaker who is ageing — growing "stiff and cold," the language already touched by the grave — and saying her own goodbyes to "this and that," the small surrenders of a long life. Again the stanza pivots on a two-word line, "But you," which holds the beloved exempt from the speaker's visible ageing exactly as the first stanza held the speaker exempt from the world's verdict of death. The two refusals — "But I", "But you" — are the poem's secret pact: each keeps the other alive.
The final stanza opens the poem outward into the future and into hope: "And one fine morning in a sunny lane / Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear / That nobody can love their way again; / While over there / You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair." The sudden warmth — "one fine morning," "a sunny lane" — is startling after the cold of the second stanza. Some unknown young couple will believe, as the young always do, that "nobody can love their way again." The speaker's reply is not bitter but serenely superior: from somewhere beyond — "over there" — she and her beloved will exchange a knowing intimacy. The future-perfect constructions, "You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair," place the gesture in an eternity outside ordinary time; the affectionate, careless act of tossing a lover's hair becomes proof that this love outlasts both the lovers and the young couple who think they invented passion. The poem that began "What good is there in speaking?" ends by needing no speech at all: the smile and the touch say everything.
Mew's reputation rests partly on her metrical daring, and "À Quoi Bon Dire" is a small masterclass in expressive irregularity. The poem refuses to march to a fixed beat: long, conversational lines suddenly contract to the bare stress of "But I" or "But you," so that the line length itself becomes a unit of feeling. The longest line in the poem is the warm, expansive penultimate line about the boy and girl in the lane — the sentence opens out exactly as the imagined future opens out — while the shortest lines pin the poem's two acts of defiance to a single foot apiece. A reader's voice cannot help dropping, after each long line, into the silence that follows the truncated one; the white space around "But I" is part of the poem, an audible hush in which the private faith is held.
The rhyming reinforces this. Mew rhymes "said / dead," "Good-bye / I," "cold / old," "too / you," binding the world's verdict to the speaker's refusal at the level of pure sound: "dead" is answered, and overruled, by the rhyme-partner "I"; "old" is overruled by "you." Because the defiant monosyllables fall on rhyme-words, the poem's resistances ring out — the sound-pattern itself keeps insisting but I, but you against everything the longer lines concede. The final line, with its delicate balance of "You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair," closes the poem not on a rhyme of loss but on a shared, intimate gesture, the two pronouns ("You … I") side by side at last after a whole poem of their separation.
Mew's poem belongs to the great tradition of love that survives separation and death, and it rewards comparison across the ages. Set it beside Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which the lovers' souls remain joined though their bodies part, or beside Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and "Echo," with their tender negotiations between the living and the dead, or Hardy's "Poems of 1912–13," haunted by a wife recovered only in memory. Mew's distinction is the wry serenity of her close: where the Victorian elegy mourns, Mew almost teases the young lovers with her secret, and the future-perfect tense ("you will have smiled") lets her claim a vantage point outside ordinary mortal time — the lovers are imagined as already, eternally, exchanging their knowing look. Within the anthology, the link to Jennings's "One Flesh" is instructive by contrast: both are poems of love and silence, but Mew's silence keeps a love defiantly alive, whereas Jennings's silence marks a love that has cooled — silence as fidelity in Mew, silence as estrangement in Jennings. The pairing also reverses across the life-course: Mew's poem watches a young couple from the far side of a long fidelity, while Jennings's watches an old couple from the position of their child, so that between them the two poems frame love at its beginning and at its long attenuated end.
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) is usually counted as the only woman associated with The Movement, the loose grouping of English poets in the 1950s that included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn, and whose work was gathered in Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines (1956). Movement poets reacted against the perceived excesses of 1940s Neo-Romanticism, favouring clarity, restraint, traditional forms, ironic understatement, 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 the principle in Matthew 19:5–6: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." The poem examines what happens when the sacramental ideal of marital unity collides with the physical reality of ageing and emotional distance. It appeared in her 1966 collection The Mind Has Mountains (whose title is itself a quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins's "terrible sonnet" "No worst, there is none"). The poem is widely understood to concern Jennings's own parents in their later years, though she was characteristically reserved about autobiographical readings, and she disliked being grouped too readily with the confessional poets, insisting that the personal occasion of a poem should be transmuted into something impersonal and shared.
The poem consists of three six-line stanzas, broadly iambic and gently rhymed. The regularity of the form mirrors the routine of the couple's lives — predictable, ordered, almost devoid of surprise — while the slight unsettling of the rhymes catches the unease beneath the calm. Each stanza closes by tightening towards a couplet-like emphasis, and Jennings repeatedly uses that final position to deliver the stanza's quiet emotional shock: the "former passion," the "Chastity," the "fire … grown cold."
The opening establishes the couple in separate spaces: "Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, / He with a book, keeping the light on late, / She like a girl dreaming of childhood." The physical separation — "separate bed" — is the poem's most striking detail. These are people who were once "one flesh" but are now divided even in the most intimate domestic space. The husband's "book" and the kept-on light are small barricades of distraction; the wife, by contrast, is "like a girl dreaming of childhood," the simile carrying her back past the marriage to a pre-marital, pre-sexual innocence. She dreams not of her husband but of childhood — of a time before the compromises and disappointments of adult love.
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