The Rambling Sailor/Introductory Note

CHARLOTTE MARY MEW was born in London on the 15th November, 1870, the daughter of an architect. She passed the whole of her life except for brief intervals in the heart of Bloomsbury.

While she was still young her father died and left her and her mother and family in financial difficulties. Her temperament was keyed very low, and the tribulations and batterings of her personal life, including the poverty that dogged her all her days, were probably responsible for the fact that many of the poems in her first book, The Farmer's Bride, and indeed in this second book of posthumous poems, show an intense preoccupation with death and disaster either physical or spiritual.

In 1922, through the united efforts of Thomas Hardy (who thought her one of the best poets of the time), John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, she received a Civil List pension of seventy-five pounds a year. This was helpful in mitigating the strain of poverty, but no sooner was the financial burden alleviated than her mother died, and her own health broke down. Both these trials were overcome and all seemed ready for a return to productive life when her beloved sister was stricken with a fatal illness and died after some months of agony. For a time it seemed she could repulse this last attack of Fate, but subsequently it became evident that her resistance had given way and she died in a nursing home, by her own hand, on the 24th March, 1928.

No pen portrait can convey the deep charm and rare wit that were the continual delight of Charlotte Mew's intimates; nor can the passionate sincerity and truth with which she faced the onslaughts of life be portrayed except through her poems. The following quotations, which are taken from her volume, The Farmer's Bride, exemplify this point:—

No subterfuges were possible for her, no lurking in stealthy byways stalking the hope of better things in a Better World. She was always conscious she once admitted of what seemed to her an Earthly Presence, a bond, an actual contact with the earth, of a knowledge of final peace in the heart of things. "Moorland Sanctuary " may be taken as her own expression of her belief. She read many times, to the writer of this note, a poem (which has not been found among her papers) which described how a Breton shepherd one night left his sheep to lay himself at the feet of a Wayside Calvary, and the next morning passers-by found a heap of leaves—all that was left of him. She finished the poem with her characteristic toss of the head, and the admission that for her part, such a death, perhaps in a wood, was all she asked. But Death came to her in the heart of London, surrounded by no trees, no birds, nothing but grey bricks and greyer life.

It is not proposed in this brief note to offer a critical estimate of her work. The fact that she was awarded a Civil List pension is sufficient evidence of the esteem in which it was held by sensitive critics. Among Thomas Hardy's papers was found copied from The Sphere, the poem "Fin de Fête."

The best of her early poems and those most indicative of her tragic personality are included in this volume, in a separate section. All of them appeared in Temple Bar, to which periodical she contributed verse and prose for a number of years in her early life. She also contributed essays, poems and stories to The Yellow Book, The Englishwoman, The Nation, The New Statesman, The Chapbook,, etc.

Charlotte Mew's dislike of publicity was extreme and her defiant reserve, in later years, placed every obstacle in the way of those who desired to secure her friendship. However, to those she loved and trusted she gave loyalty and companionship without stint.