Charlotte Mew

—and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees— (R evelation ) They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens. For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall, The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves, With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all. I remember one evening of a long past Spring Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive. I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing, But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive. The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain, Green and high And lonely against the sky. (Down now!—) And but for that, If an old dead rat Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again. It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day; These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem: When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them. It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes; Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains, In the March wind, the May breeze, In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas. There was only a quiet rain when they were dying; They must have heard the sparrows flying, And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying— But I, all day, I heard an angel crying: ‘Hurt not the trees.’

Bury your heart in some deep green hollow Or hide it up in a kind old tree; Better still, give it the swallow When she goes over the sea. In Saturday’s Market there’s eggs a ’plenty And dead-alive ducks with their legs tied down, Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty— Girls and the women of the town— Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces, Poises and whips and dicky-birds’ seed, Silver pieces and smiling faces, In Saturday Market they’ve all they need. What were you showing in Saturday Market That set it grinning from end to end Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty—? Cover it close with your shawl, my friend— Hasten you home with the laugh behind you, Over the down—, out of sight, Fasten your door, though no one will find you, No one will look on a Market night. See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under The red dead thing—. In the white of the moon On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder! Best make an end of it; bury it soon. If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it? Or blood on the stairs, When a murder is over and done why show it? In Saturday Market nobody cares. Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping And still, for a long, long rest, There’s never a one in the town so sure of sleeping As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast. Think no more of the swallow, Forget, you, the sea, Never again remember the deep green hollow Or the top of the kind old tree!

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, And 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 and 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.

Not for that city of the level sun, Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze— The shadeless, sleepless city of white days, White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done. We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare, The clamour of that never-ending song. And if for anything we greatly long, It is for some remote and quiet stair Which winds to silence and a space for sleep Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

Here, in the darkness, where this 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 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 Crowing 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 too 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 has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags, For so He giveth His belovèd 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 gemlike 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 to speak to, friend to friend: Out of the long procession, black or white or red Not 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 Looking at it through tears, through tears. Then straight from these there broke the kiss, I think You must have known by this The thing, for what it was, that had come to You: She did not love You like the rest, It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, She gave You something altogether new. And through it all, from her, no word, She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard: Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair, Or by the wet cheek lying there, And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day That You can change the things for which we care, But even You, unless You kill us, not the way. This, then was peace for her, but passion too. I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew, The only one that I would care to take Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake. Almost as happy as the carven dead In some dim chancel lying head by head We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through— One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life, Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Are you there?” And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs. So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day, It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away: But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have cared so much ? She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch. And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these, Though they lived there a thousand years. Outside, too gravely looking at me. He seems to stand, And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came Unwillingly back, what could it claim Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech, Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach, The scarred, not quite human hand ?— Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings When it has learned so long not to think, not to be, Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things That I shall not see! I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head: When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead: And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said, He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy Week When there was no one else to see I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly, If He had ever seemed to notice me Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

The town is old and very steep A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, And black-clad people walking in their sleep— A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers To her new grave; and watched from end to end By the great Church above, through the still hours: But in the morning and the early dark The children wake to dart from doors and call Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend, Before it climbs up to the park, Ken’s is in 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—

Up here, with June, the sycamore throws Across the window a whispering screen; I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose, Than anything else on this earth that is out in green. But I mean to go through the door without fear, Not caring much what happens here When I’m away:— How green the screen is across the panes Or who goes laughing along the lanes With my old lover all summer day.

Sweetheart, for such a day One mustn’t grudge the score; Here, then, it’s all to pay, It’s Good-night at the door. Good-night and good dreams to you,— Do you remember the picture-book thieves Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through, And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves? So you and I should have slept,—But now, Oh, what a lonely head! With just the shadow of a waving bough In the moonlight over your bed.

To-night again the moon’s white mat Stretches across the dormitory floor While outside, like an evil cat The pion prowls down the dark corridor, Planning, I know, to pounce on me, in spite For getting leave to sleep in town last night. But it was none of us who made that noise, Only the old brown owl that hoots and flies Out of the ivy—he will say it was us boys— Seigneur mon Dieu: the sacré soul of spies! He would like to catch each dream that lies Hidden behind our sleepy eyes: Their dream? But mine—it is the moon and the wood that sees; All my long life how I shall hate the trees! In the Place d’Armes the dusty planes, all Summer through, Dozed with the market women in the sun and scarcely stirred To see the quiet things that crossed the Square—, A tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird, The hump-backed barber Célestin Lemaire, Old Madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair, And filing past to Vespers, two and two, The demoiselles of the pensionnat Towed like a ship through the harbour bar, Safe into port, where le petit Jésus Perhaps makes nothing of the look they shot at you: Si, c ’ est défendu, mais que voulez-vous? It was the sun. The sunshine weaves A pattern on dull stones: the sunshine leaves The portraiture of dreams upon the eyes Before it dies: All Summer through The dust hung white upon the drowsy planes Till suddenly they woke with the Autumn rains. It is not only the little boys Who have hardly got away from toys, But I, who am seventeen next year, Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hear That lonely passion of the rain Which makes you think of being dead, And of somewhere living to lay your head As if you were a child again, Crying for one thing, known and near Your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear That pelts and beats with it against the pane. But I remember smiling too At all the sun’s soft tricks and those Autumn dreads In winter time, when the grey light broke slowly through The frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds. And when at dusk the singing wind swung down Straight from the stars to the dark country roads Beyond the twinkling town, Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by, Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead, We left behind us the old world of dread, I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky. And then in Spring for three days came the Fair Just as the planes were starting into bud Above the caravans: you saw the dancing bear Pass on his chain; and heard the jingle and the thud. Only four days ago They let you out of this dull show To slither down the montagne russe and chaff the man à la tête de veau Hit, slick, the bull's eye at the tir, Spin round and round till your head went queer On the porcs-roulants.Oh! là là! fête! Va pour du vin, et le tête-a-tête With the girl who sugars the gaufres! Pauvrette, How thin she was! but she smiled, you bet, As she took your tip—“One does not forget The good days, Monsieur”. Said with a grace, But sacrebleu: what a ghost of a face! And no fun too for the demoiselles Of the pensionnat, who were hurried past, With their “Oh, que c’est beau—Ah, qu’elle est belle!” A lap-dog’s life from first to last! ; The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good days for dreaming in, And at the end in the big Circus tent we sat and shook and stewed like sin! Some children there had got—but where? Sent from the south, perhaps—a red bouquet Of roses, sweetening the fetid air With scent from gardens by some far away blue bay. They threw one at the dancing bear; The white clown caught it. From St. Rémy’s tower The deep, slow bell tolled out the hour; The black clown, with his dirty grin Lay, sprawling in the dust, as She rode in. She stood on a white horse—and suddenly you saw the bend Of a far-off road at dawn, with knights riding by, A field of spears—and then the gallant day Go out in storm, with ragged clouds low down, sullen and grey Against red heavens: wild and awful, such a sky As witnesses against you at the end Of a great battle; bugles blowing, blood and dust— The old Morte d’Arthur, fight you must—. It died in anger. But it was not death That had you by the throat, stopping your breath. She looked like Victory. She rode my way. She laughed at the black clown and then she flew A bird above us, on the wing Of her white arms; and you saw through A rent in the old tent, a patch of sky With one dim star. She flew, but not so high— And then she did not fly; She stood in the bright moonlight at the door Of a strange room, she threw her slippers on the floor— Again, again You heard the patter of the rain, The starving rain—it was this Thing, Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes;— Oh God! it dies, But after death—, To-night the splendour and the sting Blows back and catches at your breath, The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world, the sea, the Spring, The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the Enchanted Thing! At first you scarcely saw her face, You knew the maddening feet were there, What called was that half-hidden, white unrest To which now and then she pressed Her finger-tips; but as she slackened pace And turned and looked at you it grew quite bare: There was not anything you did not dare:— Like trumpeters the hours passed until the last day of the Fair. In the Place d’Armes all afternoon The building birds had sung “Soon, soon”, The shuttered streets slept sound that night, It was full moon: The path into the wood was almost white, The trees were very still and seemed to stare: Not far before your soul the Dream flits on, But when you touch it, it is gone And quite alone your soul stands there. Mother of Christ, no one has seen your eyes: how can men pray Even unto you? There were only wolves’ eyes in the wood— My Mother is a woman too: Nothing is true that is not good, With that quick smile of hers, I have heard her say;— I wish I had gone back home to-day; I should have watched the light that so gently dies From our high window, in the Paris skies, The long, straight chain Of lamps hung out along the Seine: I would have turned to her and let the rain Beat on her breast as it does against the pane;— Nothing will be the same again;— There is something strange in my little Mother’s eyes, There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring— The smell of beasts, the smell of dust—The Enchanted Thing! All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair Of any woman can belong to God. The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod, There had been violets there, I shall not care As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.

Three summers since I chose a maid, Too young maybe—but more’s to do At harvest-time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human; Like the shut of a winter’s day Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman— More like a little frightened fay. One night, in the Fall, she runned away. “Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said, ’Should properly have been abed; But sure enough she wadn’t there Lying awake with her wide brown stare. So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down We chased her, flying like a hare Before out lanterns. To Church-Town All in a shiver and a scare We caught her, fetched her home at last And turned the key upon her, fast. She does the work about the house As well as most, but like a mouse: Happy enough to chat and play With birds and rabbits and such as they, So long as men-folk keep away. “Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech When one of us comes within reach. The women say that beasts in stall Look round like children at her call. I’ve hardly heard her speak at all. Shy as a leveret, swift as he, Straight and slight as a young larch tree, Sweet as the first wild violets, she, To her wild self. But what to me? The short days shorten and the oaks are brown, The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky, One leaf in the still air falls slowly down, A magpie’s spotted feathers lie On the black earth spread white with rime, The berries redden up to Christmas-time. What’s Christmas-time without there be Some other in the house than we! She sleeps up in the attic there Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown, The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!