![]() Writing in a letter to Lady Robert Cecil about the poem, Virginia Woolf said that the jury at the coroner’s inquest found the charwoman to have been mad, ‘which proves once more what it is to be a poet in these days’. (Follow the link above to read the full, longer poem.) ![]() To where there’s no cooking, or washing, or sewing,įor everything there is exact to my wishes,įor where they don’t eat there’s no washing of dishes …’ ![]() Her last words on earth were: ‘Dear friends, I am going She lived in a house where help wasn’t hired: Here lies a poor woman who was always tired, This has become a popular comic poem, but its origins appear to have been in tragedy: the unknown charwoman who wrote it in 1905 effectively penned it as her suicide note, citing extreme fatigue as her reason for ending it all. No pick of classic poems by women poets about womanhood – which looked back to poets of ages past – would be complete without something from the prolific Emily Dickinson (1830-86):ĭickinson, famously, never married – but here, in this poem, Dickinson adopts the voice of a wife as a way of musing upon the place of the wife in society, especially as the poor woman is ‘eclipsed’ by her husband. ![]()
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