Charlotte Mew*
‘When her death was reported in the local Marylebone newspaper, she was casually described as "Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer"'
-- from a memoir by Alida Munro
Charlotte, to-day I walked along streets where you died,
That remote and desolate Spring of nineteen twenty-eight,
With Anne dead, Ma gone, and the other two immured inside
Some asylum still, or dead, but lost to you, all hate
Shadowed and masked and laid away, which ever way it was.
Charlotte, to-day the balustrated houses balanced in pity
Above the chimes of sunlight and waiting ambulances,
And all around, the soft and moulded web of your city
Hung like a shroud of sound, and the pigeons drank
From the gutters, nervously treading the sloping tiles.
Don’t keep me. Let me go, you said,
And I thought of the first sessions
Starting in the clinics, and the bread
For the day’s hunger in the ovens
Of the bakery, and the swirl of wings
Beating around the stained pillars
Of St. Marylebone church, and all the Springs
Which have restored to vogue or memory since then
Wavered and faded and dissolved until I saw you
As you went out alone and bought the disinfectant
Which killed you, Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer.
Don’t keep me. Let me go, you said,
And you lay with your small dead
Face turned to the grey light
On the blank brick wall.
* taken from Elizabeth Bartlett, "A Lifetime of Dying" Poems 1942-1979