Rooms- Charlotte Mew

In this poem, Mew uses rooms as an extended metaphor to elucidate the limitations on the speaker’s
ability to experience liberty and fulfilment she seems to long for, causing her to reside in a state of joyless
melancholy.

- Confinement she feels due to societal norms and how that affects her ability to live freely

- Effect of the title ‘Rooms’ already suggests being locked within a small and tight area, unable to break
free. ‘Rooms’ is a polysemic word as it has more than one assigned meaning. On one hand it means ‘the
different areas in a house’. On the other it means space and connotes the idea of ‘living-room’ or
‘breathing room.’ Throughout the poem, rooms come to symbolize the feeling of confinement that
prevents the speaker from freely expressing her identity.

- Extended metaphor throughout the poem suggests living life in series of ’rooms’ represents stifling social
and personal limits and restrictions

-Nasal sounds are good at suggesting repressed emotion and are particularly strong in the first line. The
repetition of letters at the beginning and within words is called consonance. Aspirant alliteration expresses
a release of pent-up emotion – the opposite of nasal. The combination of the two creates a nice poetic
tension between the way society restricts and limits the speaker, and her inner desire to break free of such
restrictions. The ‘steady slowing down’ of the heart is regulated and measured through alliteration and
consonance: S and W. These sounds work together with rhythm to achieve this ‘slowing’ effect.

-Written in regular tetrameter, the formal rhythm faintly suggests the formality of a life lived in a society
that has strict norms and values. The first two lines suggest that living under the pressure of these norms
has a deadening effect. The poem begins with a rhyming couplet – again, a formality, suggesting the
speaker has got used to living life in a formal and austere way. Later, the rhyme scheme will become more
irregular, creating the impression the speaker wants to break loose from formal constraints.

-The word ‘little’ is an important description – it suggests the restrictions on the speaker’s life are becoming
tighter and tighter.

-Mew uses imagery to create a mental picture of a stifling, airless room, rank with the musty, sharp odour
of seaweed. Damp suggests the room may be mouldy and uncomfortable too.

-There is a note of resignation and fatalism in the speaker’s tone of voice in this line. The phrase ‘for good
or for ill’ suggests she is resigned to the narrow life that fate and circumstance has given her.
- Mew uses imagery to create a mental picture of a stifling, airless room, rank with the musty, sharp odour
of seaweed. Damp suggests the room may be mouldy and uncomfortable too. ‘seaweed smell’ and
‘damp rooms’ contribute to the idea of these rooms conjuring up traumatic past events and adds to the
idea of these events being completely unbearable.

- At the end of the poem, enjambment –a technique running lines of poetry one into another without break
or pause – speeds up the poem, creating the impression that the speaker’s thoughts are rushing towards
the grave: she is eager to escape social confinement.

-The intense dejection and despondence the speaker seems to experience

- ‘Steady’ and ‘slowing’ both suggest slowness, and feelings of apathy and lethargy. The diction in the
opening lines is a little sad, regretful, and resigned.

- The poem is written in a mixture of iambs and anapests which, in the opening couplet, associate with the
quickening and slowing of the speaker’s heart as she experiences an ever-changing rollercoaster of
emotion.

- These lines have a list-like structure, as the speaker reels off unpleasant memories. The conceit – that
rooms are responsible for the emotional death of the speaker – is developed through this list. This
implies an accumulation of negative emotions that were able to force Mew into a state of complete
desolation

- The poem finishes by asserting the beauty of the wider world. The sun stands for ideas such as warmth,
nurture, care and comfort. A complete contrast to Mew’s experiences in life

- The ‘slowing of the heart’ is a metaphor expressing the speaker’s emotional death. The ‘steady slowing
down’ of the heart is regulated and measured through alliteration and consonance: S and W. These
sounds work together with rhythm to achieve this ‘slowing’ effect.

- The speakers yearning to break free and the affirmation of the true tragedy that even death will be
better than her current living kind of death

- The speaker seems to acknowledge ‘for good or for ill’ to herself. The second hyphen creates a dramatic
pause before the final words of this section – ‘things died.’ And also suggests an acceptance with the
prospect of death due to the matter of fact statement that it is
- Words that describe the final ‘bed’ in the poem – particularly ‘dustier’ – imply the speaker is thinking
about her grave, perhaps as an escape. This is also supported by the diction ‘lie dead’

- The speaker expresses both sleeping and waking using a simile marker: ‘seems.’ The use of figurative
language suggests that one state feels much like another. It develops the idea that her life has become a
kind of ‘living death’ (So the two seem intertwined and providing the same existence: nothingness)

- The second line employs alliteration and consonance, blending nasal sounds with W. These sounds are
‘fuzzy’ and unclear, blurring the line between sleeping and waking, which is the speaker’s experience of
life at this point in the poem. Thus, death seems very similar to her current life so is not to be feared

- Just as the longer and shorter lines suggest restlessness and an unwillingness to be confined, meter also
contributes to this effect. The third line features a trochaic reversal, and the usual tetrameter varies
enormously from line to line in this section of the poem.

- The eighth line is noticeably longer than the others in the poem. Written in one unbroken stanza that
resembles a room, this line seems to want to break out and escape. In this way, spatial form – the way
the lines are arranged on the page – echoes the ideas of the poem.

The repetition of the word ‘dead’ draws attention to this emotive

idea and encourages us to question what exactly has died. The
death is figurative more than literal.