The life of the English poet Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) was haunted by loss and the specter of mental illness. Three of her brothers died in childhood, while another brother and sister were committed to mental institutions for life. Both Charlotte and her remaining sister, Anne, resolved never to have children, fearing that they might transmit the family strain of insanity. Charlotte, in any case, was attracted to women, not men.

Yet in keeping with the atmosphere of doom which seems to have pervaded her entire existence, her love affairs were inevitably one-sided and ended in humiliating rejections. Although the 1916 publication of a poetry collection, “The Farmer’s Bride,” gained her entrée into fashionable London literary circles, she continued to live in poverty with her sister, who died of cancer in 1927. Charlotte, her family’s sole survivor, entered a sanatorium the following year and took her own life by drinking Lysol.

All of this sounds grim, as it is. Echoes of loneliness, grief, and rejection resonate through Charlotte Mew’s poems. Although among her literary friends she cut a tiny, eccentrically dapper figure, dressed in men’s suits, the voice of her poems is the voice of a person in pain. Her various personae cry out with that voice. The young husband in the titular poem from her book, “The Farmer’s Bride,” for example, sounds on the edge of derangement, both from sexual frustration and from despair at his wife’s terror of him, of men in general, and of the whole human race.

Today’s Poem of the Day, however, taken from the posthumous 1929 collection “The Rambling Sailor,” seems to strike a different note. Yet does it? The poem’s observations of quiet summer beauty, in rhyming lines that meander from tetrameter to hexameter to trimeter and back again, comprise — as begins to be obvious by line three — a renunciation of this world. And if it is a beautiful world, filled with the green whispers of the sycamore, it is still a world where someone else “goes laughing along the lanes / With my old lover.” The rejected one’s only hope, as she persuades herself with a pathetic show of bravery, is to remove herself from the possibility of caring. 

From a Window 
by Charlotte Mew 

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. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.