‘Everything there is to hear / In the heart of hidden things’: Reticence and Revelation in the Poetry of Charlotte Mew

This chapter explores how many of Mew’s enigmatic or elliptical poems achieve their power by obliquely signalling or gesturing towards what they cannot speak of directly—be this a symbol, presence, encounter, or experience. In Mew’s dramatic monologues, this charged communication can occur via speakers who, facing an experience they cannot fully grasp or comprehend, are nonetheless compelled to articulate it in the limited language available to them. Yet in doing this, such speakers still manage to convey something of the haunting, elusive thing that tantalises them. One of the ways they do this is through the deft deployment of texts by literary precursors, such as Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Christina Rossetti, with Mew skilfully positioning her own work so that it picks up a charge from an anterior poetic or textual forcefield. Readings of ‘Saturday Market,’ ‘The Farmer’s Bride,’ ‘Monsieur qui passe,’ ‘Ken,’ ‘The Changeling,’ ‘The Quiet House,’ ‘The Fête,’ and ‘Moorland Night’ show how Mew uses intertextuality, indirectly echoing or referring to poems and other texts by Victorian precursors as a strategic way of adding nuance and resonance to her speakers’ communications.