The Armers Bride

The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew.

This poem is about a rushed marriage with the sense of a forced marriage. The poet never achieved much success although acclaim from other successful poets. She spent most of her life in poverty.

The two subjects in this poem are the farmer and his wife. The speaker throughout the poem is the farmer. The first three lines suggest that the farmer was too busy with farming to spend time with his wife. The view of this poem and the look towards women is old fashioned and the syntax is unusual due to the dialect. There is a rhyming couplet at the end of every stanza apart from the last stanza.

There is a sense that the marriage depresses her and we learn that the farmer's wife is androphobic. Line 6 suggests the farmer's wife is cold and the use of linguistic techniques such as personification and metaphor suggest that she is like a frightened fairy and not happy with her life. Non-standard english is used to bring the farmer's personality to life and the incorrect language refelects the farmer's accent.

Line 10 suggests that the farmer's wife is out on her own and that the farmer has lost control of her.

The idea of sheep and animals is extended and there is a sense that she is afraid of falling asleep and that she is a fearful person. Metaphorically, the farmer's wife feels trapped and is being hunted. The mention of church and religion promts a Catholic reading re-inforcing the fact that divorce is frowned upon. Divorce appears as not an option and that the farmer will keep her.

You can physically see the wife's fear and she is not emotionally attached to her husband. There is a big semantic field of hunt and capture due to the sinister tone of the lines 18 and 19. Society has strong sexual views and there is a reading that she is scared to be the 'wife' of the time and have sexual relations. The wife does the housework which makes the male perspective of the poem clear. There is continuous animal imagery but...