The Rambling Sailor
In the old back streets o’ Pimlico
On the docks at Monte Video
At the Ring o’ Bells on Plymouth Hoe
He’m arter me now wheerever I go…
Charlotte Mew, a Modernist poet who in her day was considered one of the finest of the age by writers of great stature, has lived for long in the shadows of the literary canon. An avant-garde Bloomsbury poet that never quite broke through into the public’s consciousness, Mew’s experimental style, with prose-like lines, has stood the test of time, and is as relevant and powerful today as when it was written.
Published in 1929, a year after her tragic death, The Rambling Sailor collects Mew’s final, most powerful verse, in which love, nature and religion all intermingle to paint pictures of pain, hope and a deep love of the natural world through the writer’s knowledgeable eyes.
‘The only poet who can give me a lump in my throat.’ — Siegfried Sassoon
‘Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our day.’ — Thomas Hardy
‘The greatest living poetess.’ — Virginia Woolf