The Full Text of “A Quoi Bon Dire”
1Seventeen years ago you said
2Something that sounded like Good-bye;
3And everybody thinks that you are dead,
4But I.
5So I, as I grow stiff and cold
6To this and that say Good-bye too;
7And everybody sees that I am old
8But you.
9And one fine morning in a sunny lane
10Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
11That nobody can love their way again
12While over there
13You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
The Full Text of “A Quoi Bon Dire”
1Seventeen years ago you said
2Something that sounded like Good-bye;
3And everybody thinks that you are dead,
4But I.
5So I, as I grow stiff and cold
6To this and that say Good-bye too;
7And everybody sees that I am old
8But you.
9And one fine morning in a sunny lane
10Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
11That nobody can love their way again
12While over there
13You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Introduction
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In Charlotte Mew's "A Quoi Bon Dire," a speaker addresses her dead beloved as if he were right at her side. To the rest of the world, it appears that the speaker's beloved has been gone for "seventeen years," but the speaker knows better. The love that she and this man shared was so great, she says, that the grave can't separate them and the years can't change them. Love, in this speaker's vision, transcends death and time. This quietly powerful poem appeared in Mew's first book, The Farmer's Bride (1916).
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Summary
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Seventeen years ago, you said something that made it seem like you were saying farewell. Now, everyone thinks you're dead—except for me.
As I get older, I've also started saying my farewells to various things. Everybody sees me as an old person now—except for you.
Someday, one lovely morning in a sunlit rural road, some young couple will embrace each other and vow that no one will ever again be in love the way they are. And yet, over there, you will have smiled at me, and I will have tousled your hair.
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Themes
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Death, Loss, and Everlasting Love
The speaker of Charlotte Mew's "A Quoi Bon Dire" talks to her dead beloved as if he were sitting right next to her. While "everybody thinks that you are dead," she tells him, she knows better. Because this couple's love for each other is so deep, death means nothing to them. They're as close with each other and beautiful to each other as they ever were. Love, this poem quietly insists, is immortal and changeless; neither time nor death can alter it.
It's been "seventeen years," the poem's speaker says, since her beloved said "something that sounded like Good-bye" to her. In other words, he died 17 years ago. Or at least, that's how it looked to the outside world. The speaker, however, knows that what "sounded like" a "Good-bye" was in fact no such thing. She can still talk to her beloved directly: death hasn't separated them at all. In fact, it might even have brought them closer. "Everybody thinks that you are dead," she tells her beloved—everybody "but I." Their persistent intimacy is a tender secret between them.
The speaker feels her beloved's ongoing care for her, too. Though she's getting to the age where she has to "say Good-bye" to a lot of things—that is, she's getting old!—she is certain that her beloved still sees her as young and beautiful. "Everybody sees that I am old / But you," she tells him.
For that matter, the couple's love seems to break the rules of time itself. The speaker closes the poem with a scene in which, in the future, a different pair of young lovers will "meet and kiss and swear / That nobody can love their way again." But mere steps away in the "sunny lane" where the speaker imagines this scene taking place, she and her beloved will have shared exactly the same kind of encounter: "You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair," she says. The subtle use of the future perfect tense here ("You will have," "I shall have") makes it sound as if this embrace is in the past and the future at the same time!
This couple's intense love, then, cuts right across time and death. Love is immortal, this poem declares, and it makes lovers immortal, too. Because of the depth of their feelings for each other, the speaker and her beloved remain eternally connected and eternally young.
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The Unique and Universal Experience of Love
Love, in "A Quoi Bon Dire," is an eternal, changeless force. Paradoxically, it's also a phenomenon that feels unique to everyone it happens to. One of the great joys of falling in love, this poem's wise and passionate speaker suggests, is feeling as if "nobody can love [your] way again"—and coming to understand that this feeling is itself universal.
In the poem's final stanza, the speaker imagines a scene in which two young lovers meet in a "sunny lane," embrace each other, and "swear / That nobody can love their way again." The speaker looks on this scene with fond amusement. She knows that this couple's sense of uniqueness is a total illusion, because she and her now-dead beloved did, said, and felt exactly the same things back in their day.
Every deep love, this scene suggests, makes lovers feel as if they're experiencing something that has never happened before and can never happen again. But this feeling is maybe the most universal part of love. All lovers, the speaker gently teases, feel their love (and their beloved) is unique.
The speaker's heartfelt tone suggests that the young lovers' illusions aren't just silliness or self-deception. Instead, believing that your love is unique is an important part of enjoying the universal and timeless experience of love. To feel that you're the only people who ever truly loved is to be part of a grand and lovely phenomenon, tapping into an eternal, changeless beauty.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Quoi Bon Dire”
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Lines 1-4
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.As "A Quoi Bon Dire" begins, a speaker reaches out to a lost beloved. "Everybody thinks that you are dead," she tells him conspiratorially. But she knows better.
To the rest of the world, it appears that the speaker's beloved has been gone for "seventeen years." It was 17 years ago, the speaker says, when her beloved said "something that sounded like Good-bye." Her choice of words here is telling. Sure, it sounded as if her beloved were saying goodbye to her. But clearly, he couldn't have been—because to her, he's still right there at her side.
The speaker's apostrophe to her beloved makes this idea plain. Though the rest of the world is certain this man is gone, she feels perfectly able to talk to him directly. In fact, everyone else's delusion that her beloved is gone only brings this couple closer together. They share a beautiful secret.
The form that Mew uses for this four-line stanza (or quatrain) helps to establish a tone of calm intimacy. The first two lines, in which the speaker lays out the circumstances, use iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Good-bye." (There's a little variation, though: the first foot of each of these lines is a trochee, the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm: "Seven-," "Something." That choice gives the opening lines a little extra push of energy.)
Then, in line 3, the rhythm changes:
And ev- | ery bo- | dy thinks | that you | are dead,
But I.Line 3, in which the speaker describes how the outside world sees the situation, is a longer, busier line of iambic pentameter (five iambs in a row). That longer line sets up a particularly emphatic contrast with line 4, where the speaker's declaration that she knows the truth lands with a thump of calm certainty: in this line of iambic monometer (just one iamb), she takes only two words to make her point.
Clearly, the speaker doesn't need to make a big fuss about knowing her beloved isn't dead at all. This is between the two of them; they know the truth, and she has nothing to prove. (The whispery sibilance that runs all through these lines—"seventeen," "said," "something," "sounded"—enhances that tone of calm, quiet intimacy.)
The poem's very title suggests that the speaker feels an unshakeable assurance in her love. The French phrase "A quoi bon dire" translates to "What's the good of saying"—a sentiment that at first might sound hopeless. But in the context of this first stanza, these words feel like a declaration of faith. To this speaker, there's no point telling her beloved that he lives on for her: he already knows that! The pair of them understand each other perfectly, and death can't separate them.
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Lines 5-8
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you. -
Lines 9-11
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again -
Lines 12-13
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
The speaker's apostrophe to her dead lover plays an important thematic role in this poem. Though "everybody thinks" that the speaker's lover is dead, she shakes that idea off: she can talk to her beloved as easily as if he were sitting right next to her. In fact, on her terms, her conversation with her lover wouldn't even technically count as an apostrophe (a term usually used to describe an address to someone or something who can't respond, like a dead person or an abstract idea).
The speaker's words to her beloved feel quiet and intimate. As she tells him that "everybody thinks that you are dead" and reflects that his last words to her "sounded like Good-bye" (though of course she knows better), it's as if she's sharing a secret with him. The world thinks they've been separated—but the two of them know better.
Strikingly, the speaker is certain that her beloved's feelings for her remain just as immediate as hers for him. In the second stanza, she tells him that "everybody sees that I am old / But you." This apostrophe stresses the idea that he's truly present for her. She's not just sending messages out into the ether and trusting that he can hear them. He communicates with her: she knows what he feels because he can still show her.
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Sibilance
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Paradox
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"A Quoi Bon Dire" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- A quoi bon dire
- Lane
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The poem's French title means, roughly, "What's the use of saying" or "What good is it to say." The poem thus starts from a place of ambiguity. Readers might take the title as a gesture of resignation (as in "What's the point of saying any of this to a dead man?") or as a statement of faith (as in "What's the point of saying all this when you, my beloved, already know everything about how I feel?"). In context, the latter reading feels more fitting!
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Quoi Bon Dire”
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Form
"A Quoi Bon Dire" uses an evolving, emotive form to tell its story of deathless love. The poem begins with two quatrains (or four-line stanzas) that mirror each other, each using the same varied pattern of meter and rhyme. The poem then ends with a cinquain (a five-line stanza) filled with longer, lusher lines.
These stanza forms match the poem's emotional development. The first two stanzas look at the speaker's love from two angles:
- The first stanza explores the intense connection she still feels with her dead beloved, while the second describes how she feels her beloved still cares for her.
- The mirrored shape of these stanzas (alongside their echoing language and rhyme scheme) helps to suggest that this love is mutual, matched, and enduring.
The longer third stanza, meanwhile, frames this love in a wider context:
- The speaker imagines a pair of young lovers meeting up in a "sunny lane" and swearing that nobody has ever loved like they have—then juxtaposes this starry-eyed pair with herself and her beloved, who felt and said just the same things long ago.
- Here, longer, steadier lines of iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Some boy | and girl | will meet | and kiss | and swear") get interrupted by a short line of iambic dimeter (just two iambs, as in "While o- | ver there").
- This mischievous-yet-tender interruption pokes fun at the lovers' illusion that their love is totally unique and unprecedented. This illusion in itself, the speaker suggests, is one of love's immortal qualities. All lovers feel like they're the only true lovers who ever existed.
The poem thus starts from an intimate, private connection. Then it widens out, suggesting that the speaker's feelings for her lost beloved are all part of a great, grand, unforgettable human experience.
"A Quoi Bon Dire" provides an excellent example of the way Mew's poetry mingled traditional poetic technique (like the use of rhyme and meter) with a more experimental Modernism (like the evolving, expressive stanza shapes and line lengths here).
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Meter
"A Quoi Bon Dire" uses an elegant and complex meter that changes shape as the poem moves along. The meter is roughly iambic the whole way through. That is, for the most part, the lines are made from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Good-bye." Variations in line length and rhythm help to create the poem's varied, emotive tone.
The first two stanzas mirror each other. Both start with lines of tetrameter (that is, lines with four strong stresses). Notice, however, that Mew doesn't stick religiously to an iambic rhythm here:
Seven- | teen years | ago | you said
[...]
So I, | as I | grow stiff | and cold
Lines 1-2 kick off with emphatic trochees (feet with a DUM-da rhythm, as in "Something") rather than iambs (as in "So I").
Both stanzas then introduce a line of iambic pentameter—a line of five iambs, as in "And ev- | ery bod- | y thinks | that you | are dead." And both conclude with a single iamb: "But I" in line 4 and "But you" in line 8. This changing rhythm creates a dramatic build:
- The four-beat lines set up a predictable rhythm.
- The longer line of iambic pentameter interrupts that rhythm, creating a little dramatic tension.
- And the final one-iamb line—in which the speaker reveals that she still feels her dead beloved is alive and conscious—comes as an abrupt surprise.
The closing five-line stanza, meanwhile, uses a different rhythm:
- For the most part, it's in iambic pentameter (as in "And one | fine morn- | ing in | a sun- | ny lane"), with the longer lines creating a feeling of breathless momentum as the speaker depicts a pair of young lovers rushing into each other's arms and swearing no one could ever feel the kind of love they feel.
- But in line 12, a line of iambic dimeter—just two iambs, "While o- | ver there"—literally interrupts this scene.
- The speaker then uses a final line of iambic pentameter to describe how she and her lover embraced just as these kids do. (Or, strangely, how they one day will embrace again! The speaker's use of the future perfect tense—"will have," "shall have"—gives the line some shivery ambiguity.)
Here, the lines of iambic pentameter suit images of young lovers swept away in romance: iambic pentameter is the traditional meter of the sonnet, after all, the form in which many of the world's greatest love poems are written. The short line of dimeter, meanwhile, interrupts the young-love fantasy that one's own love is the greatest passion the world has ever known, or could ever know.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "A Quoi Bon Dire" runs as follows:
ABAB CDCD EFEFF
There's a singsong simplicity to the rhymes in the first two stanzas—though there's some drama, too. Mew lines up her rhymes and rhythms to stress the importance of poem's two key players: "I" and "you," the speaker and her dead beloved. The mirrored rhyme schemes in those first stanzas help to subtly stress the idea that the speaker and her beloved are still completely in tune with each other. Death can't truly separate them.
Then, the third stanza comes along and breaks the pattern. It's a cinquain (a five-line stanza) instead of a quatrain (a four-line stanza), it uses a new rhythm, and it adds an extra F rhyme. That means the poem closes on a couplet—a fitting flavor of rhyme with which to describe a loving couple.
The longer closing stanza, highlighted by that rhymed couplet, quietly highlights the speaker's sense of endurance. To her, her lover isn't really gone, and their love hasn't really ended.
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is someone who is growing older and reaching out to her long-dead lover as if this person were sitting right next to her. (Note that we're using female and male pronouns to refer to the speaker and her beloved throughout this guide, given the implicit comparison of this couple to the young "boy and girl" in the third stanza. That said, Charlotte Mew herself likely felt attracted to women throughout her life, and readers can interpret the genders of the speaker and this beloved however they wish.)
Though the speaker's lover been gone for "seventeen years" and "everybody thinks that [he is] dead," she knows better. Their love was so great that she feels as if there's not the slightest distance between them, even now. For that matter, she still feels her beloved's persistent love for her. In his eyes, she knows, she hasn't aged a day, even though the rest of the world "sees that [she is] old."
This speaker's quiet, trusting apostrophe to her beloved suggests that she's a person with an unshakable faith in the power of love. Without fanfare or insistence, she makes it clear that a connection like the one she shared with this man is immortal and unbreakable. Bound by deep love, she and her lover are eternally young and eternally present to each other; death can't change them or part them.
The speaker's wider reflections also suggest there's something at once deeply private and universal in her love. At the end of the poem, she imagines a pair of young lovers who seem to believe that "nobody can love their way again." This, of course, is exactly what she and her own lover felt (and feel) about each other. Paradoxically, this speaker suggests, profound love is at once a unique and a universal experience.
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“A Quoi Bon Dire” Setting
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"A Quoi Bon Dire" offers only one brief glimpse of a setting. This comes when the speaker pictures a pair of young lovers meeting in a "sunny lane"—that is, a little country road on a fine day. This bright, leafy, natural scene feels joyful and full of life, a suitable backdrop for a vision of undying love.
But beyond that, there's no specific setting in this poem. The speaker describes love as a persistent, eternal, and unchanging force, something that stays the same across time and space. That's true of the love between the speaker and her dead beloved. But it's also true for all who love deeply.
In the poem's closing stanza, the speaker imagines "[s]ome boy and girl" embracing and swearing that "nobody can love their way again"—exactly the way that she and her beloved once did. This tenderly, gently ironic moment suggests that all lovers feel that their love is unique. The poem's ambiguous setting thus helps to underscore a sweet paradox. Love is eternal and changeless, this speaker suggests. And one of the ways in which it's most changeless is that every person who experiences it feels like no one has ever experienced it quite like they do.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Quoi Bon Dire”
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Literary Context
Charlotte Mew's life and career bridged two very different worlds. She was born in 1869 in high Victorian London and lived into the age of literary modernism in the early 20th century, dying in 1928. Both Victorian tradition and modernist experimentation are present in her verse. On the traditional side, Mew's poems usually use meter and rhyme. But in other ways, they're experimental and idiosyncratic, using unusual rhythms, syntax, and personas. (In her career-making dramatic monologue "The Farmer's Bride," for example, Mew writes in the voice of a clumsy farmer wondering why his painfully young bride wants nothing to do with him.)
"A Quoi Bon Dire," with its elegantly experimental shape, provides a good example of many of these dimensions of Mew's poetic style. This poem was collected in 1916 in Mew's first book, The Farmer's Bride (which was republished in expanded form as Saturday Market in 1921).
Mew's body of work was small, comprising only about 70 poems in total. But her work won acclaim from some of the major writers of her time, including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound. Woolf famously declared that Mew was "very good and interesting and quite unlike anyone else."
Historical Context
Charlotte Mew died by suicide in 1928: a tragic ending to a life shadowed by loss. Two of her brothers died when she was a small child; another brother and a sister were committed to mental hospitals when she was in her twenties. Shortly before she turned 30, her father died, leaving her family in financial trouble: in order to get by, the surviving Mews had to rent out their home and move into cramped quarters in their own basement. Her mother died in 1923, and her sister Anne—her last surviving, non-institutionalized family member—died of cancer in 1927. Mew lived with and nursed Anne during her illness, and she took her own life a year after Anne's death.
Though Mew published "A Quoi Bon Dire" before many of the worst of these troubles struck, the poem's vibrant, clear-eyed statement of love's persistence beyond death feels personal and hard-earned. Mew and Anne both vowed never to marry for fear of passing on their family's legacy of mental illness. And some episodes from Mew's life suggest she felt same-sex attractions, a kind of love that there was very little room to express in her time and place. Read in this context, "A Quoi Bon Dire" might feel particularly poignant and brave.
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More “A Quoi Bon Dire” Resources
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External Resources
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A Short Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Mew to learn more about her all-too-short life.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Portrait of Mew — Take a look at a photo of Mew and admire her dapper cravat: she was known for her dandyish, flamboyant personal style. She dressed in elegant menswear at a time when this was a pretty scandalous choice for a woman.
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Mew's Legacy — Read a review of a Mew biography that discusses her literary afterlife.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Charlotte Mew
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