À quoi bon dire – Charlotte Mew
A corpse is never a pleasant sight, and a talking one is normally out of the question, unless, of course, it belongs to one of those gloriously melodramatic poems that insist on dragging you through their endless, divine grief. This particular piece, a personal favourite of mine, if you enjoy watching people wallow, is the grand lamentation of a dead woman who never even made it to the altar with her husband, yet it possesses a “divinity” that touches the heart. It takes the absolute most cliché storyline imaginable. A man falls in love with a woman, passes away before they can tie the knot, and leaves her completely incapable of moving on and inflates it into a catastrophic tragedy. It really does a marvellous job of highlighting the utterly devastating, completely useless effect of futile emotion when pitted against inevitable death and the relentless passage of time.
Naturally, rather than accepting the exceedingly obvious reality that dead people remain remarkably bad at maintaining long-distance relationships, she chooses to stage a full-blown existential opera from beyond the grave. It is truly inspiring to watch someone invest so much dramatic energy in an eternal breakdown over a ghost, proving that while time marches on indifferently and death strictly enforces its non-refundable policies, human stubbornness will always find a way to make a spectacle of crying over spilt milk.
Times Fool – Ruth Pitter
Leave it to Ruth Pitter to take the universally mundane concept of getting old and spin it into an entire theatrical production. Time’s Fool is basically what happens when someone looks in the mirror, spots a grey hair, and decides the entire cosmos has personally betrayed them.
The poem follows a weary soul complaining about being a fool of time, desperate to find some ultimate spiritual home before the sun goes down. Instead of accepting that daylight ends and people age, a concept literally every creature on Earth handles without a poetry manuscript, Pitter turns a standard Tuesday evening into a cosmic crisis.
It’s genuinely hilarious how much energy is spent begging the universe for extra time, as if entropy is going to pause its entire schedule because a poet got sentimental about twilight. The whole thing reads like a high-art panic attack, proving once again that humans will do absolutely anything to avoid accepting the most basic laws of linear time.
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