Charlotte Mew

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Ken’s is the gabled house facing the Castle wall.

  When first I came upon him there

  Suddenly, on the half-lit stair,

  I think I hardly found a trace

  Of likeness to a human face

  In his. And I said then

  If in His image God made men

  Some other must have made poor Ken –

  But for his eyes which looked at you

  As two red, wounded stars might do.

  He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard,

  His voice broke off in little jars

  To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird

  He seemed as he ploughed up the street,

  Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet

  And arms thrust out as if to beat

  Always against a threat of bars.

  And oftener than not there’d be

  A child just higher than his knee

  Trotting beside him. Through his dim

  Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,

  That all the children and the deer,

  Whom every day he went to see

  Out in the park, belonged to him.

  ‘God help the folk that next him sits

  He fidgets so, with his poor wits,’

  The neighbours said on Sunday nights

  When he would go to Church to ‘see the lights!’

  Although for these he used to fix

  His eyes upon a crucifix

  In a dark corner, staring on

  Till everybody else had gone.

  And sometimes, in his evil fits,

  You could not move him from his chair –

  You did not look at him as he sat there,

  Biting his rosary to bits.

  While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,

  ‘Take it away.’

  Nothing was dead:

  He said ‘a bird’ if he picked up a broken wing,

  A perished leaf or any such thing

  Was just ‘a rose’; and once when I had said

  He must not stand and knock there any more,

  He left a twig on the mat outside my door.

  Not long ago

  The last thrush stiffened in the snow,

  While black against a sullen sky

  The sighing pines stood by.

  But now the wind has left our rattled pane

  To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing,

  The birches in the wood are red again

  And only yesterday

  The larks went up a little way to sing

  What lovers say

  Who loiter in the lanes to-day;

  The buds begin to talk of May

  With learned rooks on city trees,

  And if God please

  With all of these

  We, too, shall see another Spring.

  But in that red brick barn upon the hill

  I wonder – can one own the deer,

  And does one walk with children still

  As one did here –

  Do roses grow

  Beneath those twenty windows in a row –

  And if some night

  When you have not seen any light

  They cannot move you from your chair

  What happens there?

  I do not know.

  So, when they took

  Ken to that place, I did not look

  After he called and turned on me

  His eyes. These I shall see –

  A Quoi Bon Dire

  Seventeen years ago you said

  Something that sounded like Good-bye;

  And everybody thinks that you are dead

  But I.

  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.

  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 Quiet House

  When we were children Old Nurse used to say

  The house was like an auction or a fair

  Until the lot of us were safe in bed.

  It has been quiet as the country-side

  Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died

  And Tom crossed Father and was sent away.

  After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head,

  Poor Father, and he does not care

  For people here, or to go anywhere.

  To get away to Aunt’s for that week-end

  Was hard enough; (since then, a year ago,

  He scarcely lets me slip out of his sight –)

  At first I did not like my cousin’s friend,

  I did not think I should remember him:

  His voice has gone, his face is growing dim

  And if I like him now I do not know.

  He frightened me before he smiled –

  He did not ask me if he might –

  He said that he would come one Sunday night,

  He spoke to me as if I were a child.

  No year has been like this that has just gone by;

  It may be that what Father says is true,

  If things are so it does not matter why;

  But everything has burned and not quite through.

  The colours of the world have turned

  To flame, the blue, the gold has burned

  In what used to be such a leaden sky.

  When you are burned quite through you die.

  Red is the strangest pain to bear;

  In Spring the leaves on the budding trees;

  In Summer the roses are worse than these,

  More terrible than they are sweet;

  A rose can stab you across the street

  Deeper than any knife:

  And the crimson haunts you everywhere –

  Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have

  struck our stair

  As if, coming down, you had spilt your life.

  I think that my soul is red

  Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:

  But when these are dead

  They have had their hour.

  I shall have had mine, too,

  For from head to feet,

  I am burned and stabbed half through,

  And the pain is deadly sweet.

  The things that kill us seem

  Blind to the death they give:

  It is only in our dream

  The things that kill us live.

  The room is shut where Mother died,

  The other rooms are as they were,

  The world goes on the same outside,

  The sparrows fly across the Square,

  The children play as we four did there,

  The trees grow green and brown and bare,

  The sun shines on the dead Church spire,

  And nothing lives here but the fire,

  While Father watches from his chair

  Day follows day

  The same, or now and then, a different grey,

  Till, like his hair,

  Which Mother said was wavy once and bright,

  They will all turn white.

  To-night I heard a bell again –

  Outside it was the same mist of fine rain,

  The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street,

  No one for me –

  I think it is myself I go there to meet:

  I do not care; some day I shall not think; I shall not be!

  Madeleine in Church

  Here, in the darkness, where his plaster saint

  Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,

  And one small candle shines, but not so faint

  As the far lights of everlastingness,

  I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day,

  Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
<
br />   To something more like my own clay,

  Not too divine;

  For once, perhaps, my little saint

  Before he got his niche and crown

  Had one short stroll about the town;

  It brings him closer, just that taint –

  And anyone can wash the paint

  Off our poor faces, his and mine!

  Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as

  gold,

  But still, with just the proper trace

  Of earthliness on his shining wedding face;

  And then gone suddenly blank and old

  The hateful day of the divorce:

  Stuart got his, hands down, of course

  Crowning like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse:

  But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best, –

  He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.

  It seems so funny all we other rips

  Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably

  Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships. –

  It’s funny too, how easily we sink,

  One might put up a monument, I think,

  To half the world and cut across it ‘Lost at Sea!’

  I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night –

  No, it’s no use this penny light –

  Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown –

  The trees of Calvary are where they were,

  When we are sure that we can spare

  The tallest, let us go and strike it down

  And leave the other two still standing there.

  I, too, would ask Him to remember me

  If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.

  Oh! quiet Christ who never knew

  The poisonous fangs that bite us through

  And make us do the things we do,

  See how we suffer and fight and die,

  How helpless and how low we lie,

  God holds You, and You hang so high,

  Though no one looking long at You,

  Can think You do not suffer too,

  But up there, from Your still, star-lighted tree

  What can You know, what can You really see

  Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

  We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit

  Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning

  in the sun,

  Without paying so heavily for it

  That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were

  almost one.

  I could hardly bear

  The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the

  dusk,

  The thick, close voice of musk,

  The jessamine music on the thin night air,

  Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere –

  The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of

  my own hair,

  Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the

  high seat

  Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat

  My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the

  street.

  I think my body was my soul,

  And when we are made thus

  Who shall control

  Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet,

  Who shall teach us

  To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death,

  When the race is run,

  And it is forced from us with our last breath

  ‘Thy will be done’?

  If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless

  things,

  As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings,

  Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!

  The temperate, well-worn smile

  The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:

  And afterwards the child’s, for a little while,

  With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes

  So soon to change, and make you feel how quick

  The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick –

  (How does one though?) quite early on,

  Of long green pastures under placid skies,

  One might be walking now with patient truth.

  What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth,

  When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?

  There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen,

  With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat,

  The dainty head held high against the painted green

  And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half

  sweet.

  Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring

  To me to-day: a radiance on the wall,

  So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing

  Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,

  Sapless and lined like a dead leaf,

  All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!

  And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair –

  Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay –?

  Or could – with any one of the old crew,

  But oh! these boys! the solemn way

  They take you, and the things they say –

  This ‘I have only as long as you’

  When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two –

  Although at heart perhaps – God! if it were

  Only the face, only the hair!

  If Jim had written to me as he did to-day

  A year ago – and now it leaves me cold –

  I know what this means, old, old old!

  Et avec ça – mais on a vécu, tout se paie.

  That is not always true: there was my Mother – (well at least the dead

  are free!)

  Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am,

  Monty, too;

  The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so

  patiently;

  The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me – and

  what of me?

  But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot

  see

  How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.

  If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who

  went or never came;

  Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any

  darkened day,

  Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last

  year’s May,

  No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday;

  For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way,

  The shadows are never the same.

  ‘Find rest in Him!’ One knows the parsons’ tags –

  Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of

  baa-ing sheep:

  Yes, it may be, when He was shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the

  bleating soul in us to rags,

  For so He giveth His beloved sleep.

  Oh! He will take us stripped and done,

  Driven into His heart. So we are won:

  Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting

  wings –

  I do not envy Him his victories. His arms are full of broken

  things.

  But I shall not be in them. Let Him take

  The finer ones, the easier to break.

  And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the

  perfumes,

  Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms,

  In silks and in gem-like wines;

  Here,
even, in this corner where my little candle shines

  And overhead the lancet-window glows

  With golds and crimsons you could almost drink

  To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think

  There was the scent in every red and yellow rose

  Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey,

  And much too quiet. No one here,

  Why, this is awful, this is fear!

  Nothing to see, no face,

  Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space

  As if the world was ended! Dead at last!

  Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast.

  These to go on with and alone, to the slow end:

  No one to sit with, really, or speak to, friend to friend:

  Out of the long procession, black or white or red,

  No one left now to say ‘Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here

  your head.’

  Only the doll’s house looking on the Park

  To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out,

  very dark.

  With upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids’

  footsteps overhead,

  Then utter silence and the empty world – the room – the bed –

  The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in

  me,

  But nearly: very soon to be

  A handful of forgotten dust –

  There must be someone. Christ! there must,

  Tell me there will be someone. Who?

  If there were no one else, could it be You?

  How old was Mary out of whom You cast

  So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years

  She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past

  Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house

  And stood and looked at You through tears.

  I think she must have known by those

  The thing, for what it was that had come to her.

  For some of us there is a passion, I suppose,

  So far from earthly cares and earthly fears

  That in its stillness you can hardly stir

  Or in its nearness, lift your hand,

  So great that you have simply got to stand