"Absence," perhaps more than any other Mew poem, evokes both delight in female sexuality and conflict over its homoerotic expression (see the poem, reprinted below). As anatomically suggestive of female anatomy as Sappho's imagery, Mew's adumbration of hooded female pleasures safe from the destructive beat of masculine hooves eases the traditional Sapphic concern for a lost maidenhead, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains upon the ground.

In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose

 Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those

Your guarded heart; as safe as they from the beat, beat

 Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street. (47)

But the cost to the poet-speaker of answering the call of her female lover's eyes is conveyed in the last stanza in an arresting image of silencing by the "scarred hands" of Christ "over my mouth."

Even more unsettling is the morbid but fascinating exploration of enveloping female eroticism in "The Forest Road" (20-22), a poem pronounced pathological by a contemporary physician. It is, no less than Shelley's Alastor, a quest for what the speaker thinks is other and learns is in fact the same. By the close of each, a binding love tryst gives over to death, as the poet-speaker confronts his or her own soul in the figure of the other. But whereas Shelley's poet's pursuit of an elusive maiden brings him to the grave, "The Forest Road" explores the contours of a female symbiosis that reads simultaneously as ecstasy and death: the poet knows she "could go free," if only she could separate from the other's enlacing hair: "I must unloose this hair that sleeps and dreams / About my face, and clings like the brown weed / To drowned, delivered things." Trying to quiet her female other, to "hush these hands that are half-awake / Groping for me in sleep," at the last she cannot separate from her. The image of double suicide which closes the poem marks a mutual female climax as well: as the "dear and wild heart" of the one has been broken in its breast of "quivering snow / With two red stains on it," the other determines to "strike and tear / Mine out, and scatter it to yours." In spite of its exploration of the danger of giving in to the "poor, desolate, desperate hands" of the other, the poem ends ecstatically: "I hear my soul, singing among the trees!" Although Mew's biographers agree that her love for women remained to the end of her days a locus of conflict and psychic pain, her appreciation of female sexuality, in both benign and threatening manifestations, is at the heart of her best poetry.

The violence of "The Forest Road" is balanced by the delicate evocation of autoerotic pleasure in Mew's magnificent "Madeleine in Church." These lines fairly exult in the capacity for female self-enjoyment apart from the determining sexual presence of an other.

I could hardly bear

The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,

Page 319 →

The thick, close voice of musk,

The jessamine music on the thin night air,

Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere—

The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the

scent of my own hair,

Oh, there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat

Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat

My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.

I think my body was my soul,

And when we are made thus

Who shall control

Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet. (23)

This long poem of over two hundred lines, Mew's best, written during her years of friendship with novelist May Sinclair, is composed of both varying rhyme schemes and stanza structures; each movement of this dramatic monologue is accompanied and marked by elaborate formal variation. In this dreamlike section in particular, the incantatory rhythms and the sexual content of the lines invite enormous variation in line length and emphasis, whereas other more conversational sections call for more regularity in line length and meter.

Aside from its formal ingenuity, "Madeleine in Church" should be viewed as the culmination of an entire genre, a revision of the Victorian Fallen Woman poem, which Mew appropriates to champion rather than pun-ish female sexuality, a revision informed as much by her own sexual conflicts as by her impatience with traditional mythologies of the "pécheresse" (Mizejewski 283, 301): Mew gives her modern Magdalen both a voice—of which the canon, preferring to objectify her, had deprived her—and entitlement to full sexual enjoyment, autoerotic, heterosexual, or lesbian.

Not just the experimental female modernists, then, but a good number of those faithful to meter and rhyme wrote a poetry of marked sexual preference. Mew's passionate attachments seem always to have been to other women. By middle age she wore frankly masculine clothing, always sporting a tweed topcoat and a "felt pork-pie hat put on very straight" (Monro, "A Memoir" viii). In a photographic frontispiece to the 1953 edition of the Collected Poems (also included in the illustrations in this anthology), she appears in full cross-dress.

Despite the spareness of her production (her first book appeared in 1916 when she was nearly fifty), Mew wrote overtly feminist poetry that was highly recognized in its day. Feminist attention to Stein's, Loy's, and H. D.'s linguistic iconoclasm should not eclipse Mew's political analyses of femininity, prostitution, and war, a feminist politics that surfaces most compellingly and characteristically in her poetry. Next to Loy's explorations of the decadent "Café du Néant" we should place Mew's poems of France, among them "Pécheresse," "Le Sacré-Coeur," "Monsieur qui Passe," and the Madeleine poem described above, all of which analyze the uses to which female sexuality Page 320 →is put: "Une jolie fille à vendre, très cher;/ A thing of gaiety, a thing of sorrow, / Bought to-night, possessed, and tossed I Back to the mart again tomorrow" (31).

Mew also wrote a handful of war poems during the years 1915-1919, which number among the most passionate and feminist of that period. Rhymed, metered, divided conventionally into stanzas, "The Cenotaph" (re-printed below) and "May 1915" are pacifist hymns that re-member the "young, piteous, murdered face[s]" of the war dead by giving voice to grieving women, those "watchers by lonely hearths" who "from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled" (35).

The inclusion of Mew in this anthology, a formal but feminist poet alongside other women writers whose politics took more radical poetic forms, is a step toward a rigorous comparativism between and among women writers which might save us from critical solipsism, a comparativism alert to the politics of exile and exclusion which still underwrites canonicity.