The Topographical Second Person in Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Forest Road’

Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Forest Road’ serves as the focus for this chapter, which argues against a strictly biographical reading of the work and proposes a psychoanalytic and ecocritical approach to Mew’s shifting second-person address throughout the poem. Two later poems (‘Domus Caedet Arborem’ and ‘The Trees Are Down’) and a contemporaneous essay (‘Men and Trees’) are enlisted to help contextualize the role of forests within Mew’s poetic imaginary and civilizational critique. After a brief survey of critical reactions to ‘The Forest Road’ that have often equated its difficulty with incoherence, the chapter offers a reading of Mew’s work in a broadly relational vein. The second-person address, which serves as the nexus for much of the poem’s difficulty, is where Mew confronts the ongoing and unresolved traumas contouring her interpersonal life and relation to a more-than-human world. The result is not heroic resolution or confessional exorcism but rather an unsettled experience of grief, continuously interrupted and refused by what Winnicott termed ‘manic defence.’ The threatened loss of a love-object and the loss of a world are not readily separable in such a poem. Contemporary readers encountering Mew’s rendering of crisis and disavowal are more likely to find that it has gained in resonance and legibility during an age of climate catastrophe and ecological collapse.