The Farmer's Bride Poem Analysis

The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew.
The poet presents the cruel society through the structure of the ballad. This is depicted in the end stopped lines like ‘the shut of a winter’s day.’ The lack of enjambment crystallises the trapped situation the woman faces in this oppressive society. The verb ‘shut’ and noun ‘winter’ connotes unwelcoming and a gloomy change in the young woman’s behavior. This is farther reinforced in ‘one night, in the fall, she runned away.’ This denotes her longing to run away from her terrible fate. It also brings her entrapment by her husband into light. The verb ‘runned’ shows just how illiterate the farmer was and how unjust it was at that society where illiterate men still had more power over woman and how woman were depicted as powerless and obedient to men. The contemporary

This is evident in ‘three summers since I chose a maid’. The verb chose depicts how the young girl had no say in the matter and was simply forced into getting married. It also shows how the farmer just simply regards her as an animal, and chose her because like the simple nature of animals, he had to procreate. This shows just how helpless and powerless woman were at that time and simply had oblige. The sibilance makes the phrase sound soft and slow, like a summer day’s cool breeze and suggests how easy it is for the farmer to remember the day. Alternatively, Mew could be magnifying the farmer’s cluelessness to the girl’s androphobia and agraphobia. This evident in ‘when us was wed she turned afraid of love and me and all things human.’ The term ‘afraid’ farther magnifies her fear of sexual intercourse and abuse. The farmer is depicted as clueless and illiterate as he does not understand what is wrong with her. The rule of three emphasizes her terror of sex, his presence and everyone. The reader would pity her and sympathize with her