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Rooms (Charlotte Mew)

Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part In the steady slowing down of the heart. The room in Paris, the room at Geneva, The little damp room with the seaweed smell, And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide— Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. But there is the room where we (two) lie dead, Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed Out there in the sun—in the rain.

Notes

There is alot of alliteration

The word "Room" keeps on repeating

She is remembering the rooms and the part they played in their life

A room is something she is trapped in

Juxtaposition - Paris (The City of Love), and all she can remember is being stuck in rooms

There is confinement, congestion

She is next to the sea, which is a metaphor for freedom. But for her it is a maddening sound

Her happiness and will to live died along with his sister

She is talking about the meanlessness of sleep. She wakes up, but to what purpose?

To her, death represents freedom.However, being dead just takes her to another extremely confining room

The third last rhyme is the longest line, which goes out of the box in the poem

The poem is structured in a way like a confining box, but the third last line breaks it for it to go back. A strand of hope lost.

This perhaps talks about the confinement women are forced to have, forced to live under the weight of social convention

The poem looks like a block of text shaped like a room, the 8th line breaks free only to return again. The 8th line shows a sense of lethargy and pointlessness


Notes by Miss Farheen Khan (2023), compiled by Rayyan Jamil Khan of Class X-T Karachi Grammar School - College Section


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