[Jayne Osborn]

Hi Mary,
This is sad, but very lovely.
With a few others' confusion at the start, I think it would be clearer that L2 is still talking about the tune, with something along these lines:

The tune I grew to know became my voice,
the one that made me grow, and grow alone.


After the N having already explained about growing her voice, I'd prefer to see the "grew" in L7 as "knew":

>>>>>>>>>>>>I hear them call
and harmonize, as if they also knew
my sound. I listen to their final fall,

Just suggestions, for what they're worth. Your work is always excellent to begin with!

Jayne

[Jim Moonan]

.
I, too, found myself reading over and over again the first four lines, trying to dissect their meaning, instinctively knowing that understanding them was essential to understanding the slant and heave of the whole.

Yes, as David highlights, there is a chorus of sadness that sings throughout. There is something of a eulogy emanating from it. I keep trying to disperse the renegade thought that this is about your sister, and that she did indeed join the dead of her own free will, but the rest of the poem tells me to resist that thought. It tells me that the poem is about Virginia, Sylvia, Anne, Charlotte and you. But who is Charlotte? Is this poem saying that the sisterhood of poets who took their own lives now have your sister to sing to and with?

Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read:

• The punctuation harnesses the poem. It ends as it begins: halting, full stops at the end of each line. Rick's analysis of the poem's abrupt shifts, i.e. the opening quatrain vs. the middle eight, vs. the closing couplet, is exactly the feeling I get from it. I like it, but Rick's point/suggestion may be a good one. I don't know.

• These lines hit like a hammer:

..........It was the only tune. I had no choice.
..........It wasn’t pretty, rooted in a moan.

• These lines reveal something universal:

..........as if they also grew
..........my sound.

• This is the sound/line that is loudest to me:
  ..........final thoughts revolving in regret[LIST]

• This arrested me: the net. I thought maybe it was referring to the internet and that Charlotte might be your sister... But then I noticed that there was no comma and continues into the next line with, "to guide them to the shore, with death in hand." ( I wonder if you need the comma after shore?) The net now becomes a traditional fishing net.

• The final couplet is an abrupt change from the preceding eight lines and compels me to think this is a eulogy for your sister. I could be dead wrong about that but it feels right to me.

As you say, this is not a pretty poem. More a moan. But it is a song.


.

[R. Nemo Hill]

The impression I get, Mary, is of my ear falling through the lines of the poem, a relentless tumble down through the rush of letters and words and their emotional correspondences & resonances—. Yet that descent into darkness, that final fall, is interrupted and ultimately alleviated by the strong rhymes and the fiercely end-stopped lines which act as handholds that I catch onto as I fall. They almost bruise me as I bump against them, but they slow my approach to the abyss, they save me from surrendering too fully to that silence at fall's end. That quality of being saved, however, is not all light, it has a dark side too, it has the melancholy property of allowing one to continue to hear the moan of the painful past—that background moan that tunes "my voice", that abyss which must be faced even by a life recovered. It's as if true survival always harmonizes with its opposite.

Nemo

[Mary Meriam]

Thank you all so much. I'll respond in more detail soon but wanted to clarify that the poem refers to Charlotte Mew. Here's one of my favorites:

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 is 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.

[John Riley]

I remembered how much you love Charlotte Mew.

[Joe Crocker]

Hello Mary

The ending is blunt and powerful. Its plainspoken pain is unexpected and affecting.

Because the N says she “tried to save her sister”, then I think “sister” must refer to an actual sister or friend rather than the historic sister-poets.

There a couple of places where I get a bit lost. (My sense of direction in poetry is not very sure).

“I hear them call and harmonize, as if they also grew my sound.” The voices of the female poet-suicides are singing in harmony. But the narrator’s voice is described as a “moan”. So I don’t quite see how they grow your sound. (Perhaps their sound is like the sirens luring listeners to their deaths?)

The sentence beginning with “I listen to their final fall” has a series of commas linking ideas and things that I can’t quite join up. There is a list of suicide methods that ends with a net guiding them to shore. But “guide” and “shore”, for me at least , imply a place of safety, a refuge after the perils of the sea, rather than the place that death might take us.

But as I said at the start, the ending packs quite a punch.

Joe

[Rick Mullin]

Thanks for the introduction to Charlotte Mew, Mary. That's a beautiful poem, and, reading the bio at the link you provided, it seems that the she is the most central to your poem of the writers you mention by name. Maybe some kind of epigraph naming her--a line of her poetry with an attribution--would help. She is probably the least recognizable of the women you mention by their first name to most readers, even to a lot of poets. I think it would be a good idea because, assuming that I'm right about her relative obscurity, it would introduce and elevate her without changing that part of the poem. It would provide clarity.

[Hilary Biehl]

I, too, am glad to be introduced to Charlotte Mew. I had not heard of her before. Reading some of her poems on the Poetry Foundation site, I am struck particularly by "From a Window." The one shared here is also beautiful. Rick's idea of an epigraph is worth considering, though it might give too much weight to one name over the others.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I think the Charlotte popping up in the the poem is good the way it is, it kind of straddles that muddled line between fame and anonymity that suicide straddles as well.

Nemo

[Rick Mullin]

I guess I look at it much more simply. I know who Anne, Sylvia and Virginia are and what (among other things) they have in common. Charlotte involuntarily triggers.... Bronte? Did she....? No, right? That might be my problem, but there is some indication that the name adds an obscurity to a poem that is quite delicate and could use clarity at that point.

Inversely, the other names may be too familiar.~,:^)

Maybe attempt it? There may be a great line. And I suppose I could speculate on how the epigraphed name showing up where it does would add a dimension to the poem that would improve it.

Rick