Thursday, November 15, 2007

November 15: Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

English writer Charlotte Mew was born on this date in 1869, in London. Her sister Freda was institutionalized at age 19, in an asylum on the Isle of Wight, and remained there almost 60 years, until her death in 1958. Their brother Henry also died in a lunatic asylum in 1901, at the age of 35. Charlotte and her other sister Anne believed they might also become mad: "She and her sister had both made up their minds early in life that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity," wrote a friend. To another friend, Charlotte described her own "queer uncertain mind." Charlotte Mew died by suicide in 1928. This is one of her poems about madness, segregation, and stigma, and the belief that disability was "the incarnate wages of man's sin":
On The Asylum Road

Theirs is the house whose windows---every pane---
Are made of darkly stained or clouded glass:
Sometimes you come upon them in the lane,
The saddest crowd that you will ever pass.

But still we merry town or village folk
Throw to their scattered stare a kindly grin,
And think no shame to stop and crack a joke
With the incarnate wages of man's sin.

None but ourselves in our long gallery we meet,
The moor-hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet,
The hare-bell bowing on its stem,
Dance not with us; their pulses beat
To fainter music; nor do we to them
Make their life sweet.

The gayest crowd that they will ever pass
Are we to brother-shadows in the lane:
Our windows, too, are clouded glass
To them, yes, every pane!

2 comments:

John Pine said...

This seems to be a hymn to non-communication! We can't enter into the lives of the moorhen or the harebell or they into ours. The lunatics looking through darkly stained or clouded glass can't have much communion with the passers-by. Worst of all, we can't even communicate with our own kind (our brother shadows in the lane).

I remember a thoughtful Irishman telling me that nobody ever influences anybody else - we all travel along our own rails regardless.

I hope all this isn't true.

'...the incarnate wages of man's sin' is obviously written with heavy irony. I don't think she believes it for a moment.

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