Not for That City
Not for that city of the level sun,
Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze –
The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,
White nights, or nights and days that are as one –
We weary, when all said, all thought, all done.
We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
What, from the threshold of eternity
We shall step into. No, I think we shun
The splendour of that everlasting glare,
The clamour of that never-ending song.
And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space for sleep
Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.
Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) produced only a small body of poems in her career, but they amount to some of the most individual and formally inventive verse written in English in the early 20th century. Initially, she was more successful as a writer of short stories, and produced little poetry. Thanks largely to the quick eye of Alida Monro at the Poetry Bookshop in London, Mew was able to publish her first poetry collection, The Farmer’s Bride, in 1916. Her work was enthusiastically received and she would go on to enjoy a particularly strong response from fellow writers, including HD, Thomas Hardy and Marianne Moore. But her reputation was not sustained.
In 1981, a Collected Poems and Prose, edited and introduced by Val Warner, introduced her work to a new generation. Warner’s magnificent work is honoured by Julia Copus who, as Mew’s biographer, and a poet in her own right, has edited a new Selected Poetry and Prose. The collection contains much interesting background material as well as three previously uncollected poems.
Not for That City, first published in 1902, is in many ways a traditional sonnet. Formally, Mew often experimented with long, prose-like lines, and varieties of indentation, bringing a prose writer’s sense of larger rhythmic possibilities into the poem as dramatic lyric. Even in Not for That City, she indents alternate pairs of lines in the original, a cautious hint of more radical structures to come. But, Copus reminds us, this is only the fourth of her poems to be published. What is most striking is the treatment of the ideal – the vision of heaven as a city of perpetual sunlight. The vision is presented as a rather terrifying, relentless prospect: “The shadeless, sleepless city of white days, / White nights, or nights and days that are as one.” This is reinforced later by phrases such as “everlasting glare” and “clamour of that never-ending song”. Mew’s first editors added “is” before “said” to the line: “We weary, when all said, all thought, all done.” Copus has reinstated the original line, and so demonstrates the tangled weight to it.
The speaker’s rejection of the cosmic ideal is foreseen in the opening negative, “Not for that city,” and so, when it appears at the turn in the middle of line eight, despite the eloquence of the caesura, the transition is smooth. The alternative spelled out is an earthly, domestic scene, with a characteristic “quiet stair” and a death that brings no afterlife, only oblivion.
Not for That City is a tactful poem, not quite professing atheism but certainly rejecting the traditional religious emphasis on eternal life. It is a fluent, vivid sonnet, and also a brave one. Poem of the week is happy to be just in time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth.
