Dead Rat
At the start of “The Trees are Down” the speaker recalls coming across a dead rat in the mud and thinking it a “god-forsaken thing” that did not deserve to die in such a degrading manner. Within the framework of the poem itself, the rat becomes a symbol for the trees which are being cut down; both living entities are worthy of more respect. Wide the perspective, however, and the dead rat becomes symbolic of a thematic expression of ambitions, desires, needs, wants and passions being thwarted and respect being denied.
The Farmer’s Wife
“The Farmer’s Wife” is narrated by the farmer and thus it is through his perspective that the story is told and the characterization of his wife is delivered. Thus, all the reader knows for sure is that she is much younger, is frightened by his sexual attention, runs away from home on multiple occasions which results in being locked indoors as a kind of prisoner, is happy as long as menfolk aren’t around and winds up sleeping alone in the attic while just outside her husband burns with unsatisfied desire. If ever a female character in a poem written by a closeted homosexual was a symbolic lesbian, the farmer’s wife would be she.
Indefinite Personal Pronoun
Mew wrote plenty of love poems. Her homosexuality in an of extreme repression at a time when Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for loving men, however, prohibited her from publishing for public consumption any sort of explicit reference to that love. As a result, the speaker of her love poems never address their lover using definite personal pronouns. Instead, the other person in these poems about—mostly—broken relationships are ambiguously addressed by the speaker as “you.” And thus “you” becomes a symbol for the object of forbidden desire and the love that dares not speak in names.
Red
Red is the symbolic color representing passion in the verse of Mew. Passion in the generalized sense, not the sexual sense. Red covers the emotional gamut, but always to the extreme side the spectrum. For instance, “The Quiet House” begins with the line, “Red is the strangest pain to bear” while the farmer in “The Farmer’s Bride” asserts:
“The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What's Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!”
Throughout her work, red is the dominant symbol for extreme feelings and is often associated with the consequences of opening up to such intense sensory experiences. One good example is the title character in “Madeline in Church” confessing that as a child she could not sit and look at:
“red carnations burning in the sun,
Without paying so heavily for it”
Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene is referenced by many characters in Mew’s poetry and is allegorically portrayed by characters such as the Madeline mentioned above. Her symbolic role throughout is the incarnation of the woman who sins and seeks redemption. It has been posited by a number of biographers that Mew was not warmly accepting of her own lesbianism and that Magdalene represents the inner torment she felt at engaging in behavior she considered sinful and despite hoping for redemption was never able to stop.
