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.
This poem is a memory of a traumatic sexual event of a young woman which occurred a year before. The man was a friend of her cousin and though whatever did actually occur was too emotionally intense and troubling to make completely clear, the structure of this stanza is high suggestive. The repetition of “he” at the beginning of each line does the job of conveying what she sees in her nightmares when she is forced to relive the event; the friend of the cousin is dominant in every sense. The repetitious nature of the construction of this stanza also subtly communicates to the reader just how often her memory is forced to return to that night; it has almost evolved to the status of ritual.
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 speaker here is the farmer and the subject is his very young bride. It’s been three years since she came to live with him and almost immediately the light went out of her eyes. She sleeps in the attic and though nothing but the stairs separate him from satiating his desires, he instead remains frustrated. The description of the bride in this stanza is significant because it reflects the manner of his description of her throughout. In addition to these examples, similes are also engaged that compare the young woman to a hare, a mouse and fairy. The cumulative effect of this particular choice of literary technique deepens the emotional resonance of the monologue: from his point of view she seems to be merely afraid of becoming a woman, but his language suggests that perhaps part of her reaction is related to his inability to see her as an individual.
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 –
Like the first two examples here, this poem is yet another example of the form in which Mew thrived and felt most comfortable: the dramatic monologue. Unlike the rather straightforward narrative construction of those and most others, however, Mew pursues a more complex arrangement and literary technique. It is not quite stream-of-consciousness in the traditional sense, but the way in which Madeleine’s thoughts flit from one thing to another in concert with making her way through the church is an attempt to approximate the fragmented nature of her conscious attention. A pattern of meaning exists and it detectable which alienates it from the purer pursuit of stream-of-conscious replication of the unconscious wandering of the mind. This poem certainly explains why Virginia Woolf became such an exuberant admirer.
If in His image God made men,
Some other must have made poor Ken—
While also a dramatic monologue, “Ken” differs not just from the first two examples, but also from “Madeleine in Church” by virtue of possessing a distinctly autobiographical component. The women speaking the monologue relates the story of Ken, institutionalized as a severely mentally ill patient. In fact, the poet herself had both a brother and a sister who likewise institutionalize for most of their lives and the pain of watching them stimulated a pact she shared with another sister to avoid ever giving birth. This decision, of course, naturally incurred consequences well beyond merely ensuring motherhood would never become a part of her life. Possibly related to the genetic strain of mental illness in her family, Mew would eventually claim her own life in a gruesome attempt to cleanse herself of a delusional contagion by drinking Lysol.
