Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss;
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds open her gate.
“Come, come!” the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!
^^^
Thomas Nashe was a 16th-century poet. He died in 1601, aged 34.
On Charlotte Mew’s 150th birthday, celebrate by enjoying her lyric poem, “From a Window”:
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.
^^^
Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, Pen Pearson’s novel about Charlotte Mew, is available in paperback and ebook at Amazon, B&N, all over the web, and at your favorite local bookstore.
Design by Steven S. Drachman, from an image by Bertsz
whose house this is i think i know.
the memories beckon me ever close.
i wish they could see me walking here
between the dust and paths we chose.
the neighbors probably think it queer
to see the house lit up tonight,
not once for over a dozen years
has the fire bloomed and burned this bright.
the whispers rush by against my ear.
i see my reflection flicker and shake.
i almost feel broken down by the fear,
the fear of what will come by fate.
the windows creak and the floorboards crack.
the memories will forever pull me back.
but i have promises to keep and hopes to break,
so i will not rest easy until i wake.
^^^
Design by Steven S. Drachman, from an Image by JWahl/Pixabay.
From a young poet who remain anonymous for now, and whose short story, Stardust, was also featured in Audere.
I met British poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) as a Master’s candidate in search of the subject for her critical thesis. When I came across Mew’s strangely familiar poems, I should have suspected that Mew’s life would influence mine long after I defended my thesis, which I titled ‘The Erotic Female Voice of Charlotte Mew.’
Twenty years and an eight-hour flight later, I knelt in Hampstead Cemetery to place wild flowers on Mew’s grave while I chastised myself. Everything connecting my life with Mew’s had transpired as if it were fated. Thus I should have trusted that I would find her grave among a hodgepodge of headstones despite the odds against it, and I should have brought a single red rose, a motif in Mew’s poems, to properly memorialize Mew’s life and its haunting of my own.
Charlotte Mew’s journey took her through the sunset of Queen Victoria’s reign, World War I, and the dawning of a modern age, where she rose to fame in 1920s London, while my journey as a lover of Mew’s poems and a professor of creative writing at NSU led me to write ‘Bloomsbury’s Late Rose,’ a novel dramatizing Mew’s remarkable life.
I advise creative writing students to think outside the box when it comes to publishing. There are as many avenues to publication as there are writers. Begin by asking every author you meet about his or her path. When you learn about a path that resonates with you, follow it.
For instance, while I was still drafting ‘Bloomsbury’s Late Rose,’ I asked Karen Babine (‘All the Wild Hungers’) about her path, and she told me about the literary agent who found a publisher for her first book, ‘Water and What It Knows.’ When I finished my novel, I queried him. He replied and asked to read my book, and within a week, he agreed to agent my novel.
It’s just as important to be flexible. If one path leads nowhere, try another path. And keep writing and honing your craft while pursuing your publishing breakthrough.
Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, Pen Pearson’s novel about Charlotte Mew, is available in paperback and ebook at Amazon, B&N, all over the web, and at your favorite local bookstore. This piece first appeared on the NSU website.
An island, I have said:
A peak, where fiery dreams and far desires
Are rained on, like old fires:
A vermin region by the stars abhorred,
Where falls the flaming word
By which I consecrate with unsuccess
An acreage of God’s forgetfulness,
Left here above the foam and long ago
Made right for my duress;
Where soon the sea,
My foaming and long-clamoring enemy,
Will have within the cryptic, old embrace
Of her triumphant arms—a memory.
Why then, the place?
What forage of the sky or of the shore
Will make it any more,
To me, than my award of what was left
Of number, time, and space?
— Edwin Arlington Robinson (excerpt from An Island, 1821)
He wonders what winter would look like in their yard — a mainland winter, a
Midwest winter. He imagines the leaves, smothered and torn the snow trampling the grass, stomping out everything until spring, the break in the sky, the blossoming, the pushing on…. We need seasons, he thinks…. Spring and hail, a little dying, a little budding, the works.
For July 4th, a couple of poems, by Amy Lowell and Emma Lazarus, and a painting and drawing by Winslow Homer. Have a good Independence Day, everyone.
Fireworks, by Amy Lowell
You hate me and I hate you,
And we are so polite, we two!
But whenever I see you, I burst apart
And scatter the sky with my blazing heart.
In spits and sparkles in stars and balls,
Buds into roses — and flares, and falls.
Scarlet buttons, and pale green disks,
Silver spirals and asterisks,
Shoot and tremble in a mist
Peppered with mauve and amethyst.
I shine in the window and light up the trees,
And all because I hate you, if you please.
And when you meet me, you rend asunder
And go up in a flaming wonder
Of saffron cubes, and crimson moons,
And wheels all amaranths and maroons.
Golden lozenges and spades,
Arrows of malachites and jades,
Patens of copper, azure sheaves.
As you mount, you flash in the glossy leaves.
Such fireworks as we make, we two!
Because you hate me and I hate you.
The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
Audere: Tell us a little about Bloomsbury’s Late Rose.
Pearson: It’s a novel about Charlotte Mew, a real-life British poet whose personal life was as fascinating as her career as a poet. When Charlotte and her sister Anne were young adults, their older brother and little sister were institutionalized with schizophrenia. Afraid of passing insanity onto children, Charlotte and Anne made a secret pact to never marry. Following their father’s death, the sisters survived day to day on a dwindling inheritance. Unable to work as professional women because of their invalid mother’s gentility, each sister earned pin money through her chosen art: Charlotte as a poet, Anne as a painter.
In 1909, when the novel opens, Charlotte is on the cusp of minor celebrity, winning popular and critical acclaim for her poems. Meanwhile, Anne’s paintings suffer increasing critical neglect. Further testing the sisters’ close relationship and their pact, each sister is on the brink of falling in love: Anne with an Italian emigrant, Charlotte with novelist May Sinclair.
What inspired you to dramatize Mew’s life?
Along with her compelling personal story, I was drawn to the historical period in which Charlotte wrote. Born in 1869, Charlotte lived through significant events in British and world history. The New Woman and Art for Art’s Sake movements. The death of Queen Victoria and the reign of King Edward. World War I. The waning of class distinctions and genteel society. Women’s suffrage. The birth of modernist literature and the little magazines that published modernist works.
Telling Mew’s personal story was impossible without including the effects of those momentous events on her life.
What research did you do?
I drew on the events recorded in Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography, Charlotte Mew and her friends, Charlotte’s correspondence in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and letters from and to Mew, which helped me appreciate her wry voice and self-deprecating sense of humor. They also revealed her attitudes toward the various people she corresponded with. Visiting Mew’s homes and haunts in London, even where buildings no longer exist, was equally helpful. Those sites include her childhood home on Doughty Street (which still exists), her adult home on Gordon Street (which no longer exists), Gordon Square garden (where a placard pays tribute to the Bloomsbury Group but not to Mew), the building on Charlotte Street that housed Hogarth Studios, and Charlotte and Anne’s grave in Hampstead Cemetery.
When did you first learn about Charlotte Mew’s poetry?
I was looking for a topic for my M.A. thesis. Among many American and British poets’ work, Mew’s poems asked to be read, reread, and studied. From that introduction to this day, I admire her poems’ preoccupation with the haunting aspects of romantic love and their poignant yet unsentimental vision of life. But, most of all, I love her poetry’s language. The sounds and rhythms are at once colloquial and musical, and the varying line lengths are as original as the unconventional line breaks and spare imagery. Mew’s poetry stands by itself, of course. But when read in the context of her life, the matter-of-fact pathos of her best poems is heartbreaking. Even before I finished my thesis, I decided I would one day attempt a creative project centered on her life. More than fifteen years later, I have been fortunate enough to do just that.
What’s the significance of the title?
Charlotte Mew loved roses, and she used them frequently as a motif in her poems. She lived in Bloomsbury almost the entirety of her adult life. And, as a poet, she was a late bloomer.
Did Charlotte cross paths with members of the Bloomsbury Group?
The Mews’ house on Gordon Street stood half a block from the Gordon Square house where the Bloomsbury Group met in the early 1900s. In 1920, Virginia Woolf wrote of Mew and her poetry: “I think her good and interesting and unlike anyone else,” but the two women didn’t meet until 1926 when they happened to visit Thomas Hardy’s wife, Florence, in the hospital at the same time. However, the two women were too shy to speak to one another. Of course, Bloomsbury and timidity weren’t the only things Woolf and Mew had in common. Each writer had a sister who was a visual artist.
What are your goals for the novel?
Though Mew’s poems continue to be anthologized online and in print, as well as taught in England’s high schools, I believe Mew’s poetry remains underappreciated today. I hope this novel introduces more readers to her poems and helps fulfill Thomas Hardy’s prophecy that Charlotte Mew’s poems will be read when other poets’ work is forgotten.
An island, I have said:
When did you first learn about Charlotte Mew’s poetry?