“Rooms”
Short on lines, long on ambiguity, “Rooms” is about precisely that…to a point. The speaker recalls rooms in Paris and Geneva that “had their part / In the steady slowing down of the heart.” The allusion to slow death takes on a seemingly literal aspect with a reference to a room where the speaker and another lie dead.
“The Farmer’s Bride”
The farmer is the narrator of this dramatic monologue which recounts his marriage to maid “too young maybe” which began to fall apart almost immediately. The farmer indicates that his wife was afraid of his sexual advances and before too long she is running away from their home. Running away more than once, in fact, to the point that he has to lock her in. By the end she sleeps alone in the attic, leaving him sexually frustrated.
“June, 1915”
Summer springs not brightness and joy to the speaker in this poem, but melancholic pondering. The poem begins by asking who thinks of the first rose to appear in June this year when all the nations of Europe were at war with each other. An innocent child might, but to adults, June 1915 brings to mind not a beautiful field of roses, but a battlefield of a broken world.
“A Quoi Bon Dire”
The speaker, addressing either an actual person or the memory of that person, reminds the unidentified other that seventeen years ago something that sounded goodbye was said an in the interim everyone but the speaker has come to assume the other person is dead. The second stanza is admission of growing old and looking old to everyone but this mysterious other person. The third stanza begins with an image of a young boy and girl kissing and swearing they will never love another while
“While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair”
“Fin de Fête”
This poem and the one just mentioned have more in common than simply bearing titles in French. Both feature a speaker addressing a significant but unidentified other person. Both commence with a stanza from the future point in time looking back to the past. Both feature ambiguous and mysterious references to events in the past which still cling to the consciousness of the speaker. And the final stanza here also features a commingling of the past and present and lyrical ending which brings both characters together again if only as a memory.
“The Trees are Down”
Unlike most of Mew’s poetry, this one directly references its inspiration: the decision to saw down trees at Euston Square Garden during the 1920’s. The emotional impact upon the poet of this wanton destruction of natural beauty is made immediately apparent in the opening line:
“They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens”
From there the poem describes the sounds of the project fade into a memory the speaker infuses with symbolism: coming across a dead rat on a muddy drive and thinking that even something as far from beautiful as rats deserve a chance to live.
“I So Liked Spring”
This poem is a return to the lyrical nature of verse as ambiguous in meaning with one huge distinction: the meaning here is anything but ambiguous. In the poem’s eight lines separated into distinct and oppositional stanzas, Mew creates one of her most accessible poems of romance gone sour. Stanza one is a confession to why she so liked spring last year: because yet another unidentified “other” was with her allowing her to enjoy the other person’s enjoying the sound of thrushes. This spring will be enjoyed on its own account because the other person is not there this time around.
