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The Full Text of “Rooms”
1I remember rooms that have had their part
2 In the steady slowing down of the heart.
3The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
4The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
5And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
6 Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
7But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
8Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
9 As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
10 Out there in the sun—in the rain.
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“Rooms” Introduction
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Charlotte Mew's "Rooms" is a weary look back at a life of confinement and discontent. Its speaker recalls a series of rooms they've lived in, providing either no detail or gloomy details about each. The speaker remembers these rooms as places where "things died" and describes their current room, shared with a nameless partner, as a place where "we (two)" already feel dead. The poem becomes a study in melancholy and regret, as the speaker's living situation—and life—feels so oppressively confining that the grave seems like it can't be worse. "Rooms" was published posthumously in Mew's collection The Rambling Sailor (1929).
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“Rooms” Summary
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The speaker recalls being in certain rooms that contributed to the slow dwindling of their energy, passion, and vitality. For example, there was a room in Paris, France; another in Geneva, Switzerland; and a small, clammy room that smelled like seaweed and let in constant ocean sounds that drove the speaker crazy. There were rooms where, for better or worse, deaths and other endings took place. Now, the speaker and an unnamed partner lie as still as corpses in yet another room. While it looks like they wake up each morning, the speaker thinks they might as well go back to sleep—just as they'll someday metaphorically sleep outside in the silent, dirty "bed" of the grave, under both sunshine and rain.
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“Rooms” Themes
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The Unlived Life
The speaker of "Rooms" looks back on various rooms they've lived in over the years: “the room in Paris,” “at Geneva,” “the little damp room” by the sea, and so forth. Their reflections are more bitter than nostalgic: in breaking their memories up into a series of restrictive, four-walled spaces, the speaker suggests that their life has been defined by confinement and/or the inability to live openly. This might be because the speaker suppressed their own needs and feelings, lived in a repressive society, or both. Regardless, the poem suggests that not living fully and freely isn’t really living at all: each of these rooms has played a “part” in the “steady slowing” of the speaker’s “heart,” draining the speaker’s vitality and bringing them closer to death. In fact, the speaker’s present rooming situation is so dull and suffocating that it might as well be a grave.
The poem reveals almost nothing about the speaker's life beyond a deep dissatisfaction. The speaker mentions living in tourist spots and cultural centers like "Paris" and "Geneva," but doesn't describe anything about their experiences there. There’s no mention of meaningful places or people; instead, the speaker just says that there were “rooms.”
The poem's only flash of emotion comes as the speaker calls the sea sounds outside one of their rooms "maddening." But even this detail suggests an exasperating monotony; the repetitive sounds of the tide going in and out, day after day, might remind the speaker that their own life feels stuck in place. Paradoxically, the tide can also be read as a symbol of time and change, and its mention perhaps suggests that the speaker is frustrated by the sounds of the world moving on without them.
The scarce details all suggest a speaker who hasn't been able to live fully—whose life has been limited to the “rooms” in which they've stayed. These can be read as both literal rooms and as symbols of the speaker’s feelings of repression and confinement. Maybe they’ve felt trapped by responsibilities (like having to care for a family member, as Mew did); maybe they’ve felt repressed by social norms (it’s worth remembering that Mew grew up in morally rigid Victorian England); or maybe the speaker just has a risk-averse, reclusive personality.
In the end, it's not clear why the speaker isn't exploring and appreciating life more, just that not doing so has made them feel like the living dead. They share their current room with another person, who might be romantic partner or family member (Mew did in fact live with her sister through the latter’s illness). Though these two residents are technically alive, they "lie" as "dead" as they someday will in their actual graves. Their room is like a coffin; they “might just as well” go back to sleep after getting up, the speaker says, implying that there’s no point to their lives at all.
The only time the speaker envisions being “out there” is when they actually die and are buried in the earth, beneath “the sun” or “the rain.” This final image might imply, with grim irony, that freedom can only be found in death, when one escapes the soul-sucking restrictions and disappointments of life.
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The Trap of Unhappiness
The speaker of "Rooms" associates the various rooms they’ve lived in with confinement and disappointment. They never really describe these places, however, and it's not clear that their rooms have actually caused the speaker's unhappiness in any way. On the contrary, it seems that the speaker's own unhappiness is what has made their rooms feel dismal and confining. In this way, the poem might suggest that rooms don't affect so much as reflect the "heart[s]" of their inhabitants. Thus, while it’s possible to read these “rooms” as metaphorical representations of the confinement the speaker has dealt with throughout life, it’s also possible to interpret them as literal rooms darkened by the speaker’s own suffocating, inescapable despair. In this reading, the poem suggests that people carry their unhappiness wherever they go; if you're miserable, it doesn’t matter where you move to—you'll still be miserable there.
The speaker connects the series of rooms they've lived in with personal loss and diminishing vitality. They claim that these rooms have played a "part / In the steady slowing down of the heart," with "the heart" implying one's overall life force as well as, perhaps, one's romantic feelings. These rooms have lessened their feelings of joy, love, etc. The speaker then recalls a room where they were disturbed by the sound and smell of the ocean: a mood-dampening reminder of time and change. They also mention "Rooms where [...] things died," marking rooms as both sites and reminders of death.
The speaker then portrays their current, shared room as a bleak, tomblike place, linking it with their own decayed passion and approaching demise. With eerie detachment, the speaker refers to the room as if observing the residents from the outside: "there is the room where we (two) lie dead." Basically, the residents' shared life in this room is a preview of death: they're so listless, they "seem to sleep again" even while awake, and they're as emotionally cold as they someday will be in the "bed" of the grave.
Of course, rooms are inanimate; they can only reflect the speaker's own feelings, and it seems that the speaker projects their own lethargy and unhappiness onto the rooms around them. After all, two of the speaker's past rooms were in Paris and Geneva—places that many people find romantic and inspiring! Many people would also find a seaside room romantic rather than "maddening." Even the "things" that "died" in the speaker's past rooms did so "for good or ill." That is, some of the endings that happened there may have been positive rather than negative.
In all these cases, however, the speaker chooses not to emphasize the positive. As for the speaker's current room, they never describe it at all—it's as if the exact location and features don't matter. The room is shared, not solitary, but the speaker emphasizes only the lifelessness of the two residents rather than the relationship or companionship between them. It seems, then, that the speaker doesn't feel depressed and zombie-like because their room resembles a tomb; their room resembles a tomb because they feel depressed and zombie-like.
In general, the poem suggests that people's surroundings are what make them happy or unhappy; instead, these surroundings mirror the backgrounds, personalities, and feelings people bring to them. Even the grave, the final "room," receives "sun" as well as "rain"—but the melancholy speaker closes by emphasizing the second.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Rooms”
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Lines 1-2
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.The poem opens with a rhyming couplet that establishes a reflective, yet unsettling, tone:
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart."I remember" might sound like a nostalgic opening, but the second line hints that the speaker won't necessarily be sharing pleasant memories. The speaker is recalling rooms—not homes or other places associated with belonging—and the rooms they recall have played a role "In the steady slowing down of the heart." This phrase appears to be a metaphor for a gradual loss of energy, passion, love, etc. The speaker is remembering living spaces that seemed to age them, not places that stirred their heart.
It's unclear how or why these rooms sapped the speaker's passion, and that ambiguity will extend throughout the poem. The poem never describes any of the speaker's rooms in depth either, so it's impossible to know whether they were large or small, beautiful or ugly, etc. Since the details of each setting barely matter to the speaker, it's possible that these rooms reflect the speaker's emotional state more than they affect it. In other words, the speaker may be projecting their despair or exhaustion onto any and all rooms around them.
These first two lines establish the rough, four-beat accentual meter that will run throughout lines 1-7 of the poem. (Things get a little weirder starting in line 8.) Basically, each line contains four strong stresses, but the pattern/arrangement of those stresses varies a lot from line to line:
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.For example, there are two syllables ("that have") in between the second and third strong stresses in line 1, but only one syllable ("-ing") between the second and third strong stresses in line 2. The difference in the metrical rhythm helps convey the altered rhythm of the speaker's heart.
There's also a lot of alliteration in these two lines: "remember"/"rooms"; "have had"; "steady slowing." Both of the alliterative syllables in "steady slowing" are also metrically stressed syllables, so the alliteration heightens that stress—and adds to the sense that this second line is moving "slow[er]" than the first.
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Lines 3-5
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
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Line 6
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
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Lines 7-8
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again -
Lines 9-10
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.
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“Rooms” Symbols
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Rooms
Unsurprisingly, rooms are a key symbol in "Rooms." Because they're enclosed rather than open spaces, they represent confinement and domesticity as opposed to freedom, wildness, etc. The speaker experiences these rooms as limiting, disappointing, tame settings and implicitly contrasts them with the untamed outdoors (including the ocean "tide"). In many ways, the rooms of the poem seem more like cells. As if taking the symbolism to its extreme, the speaker ultimately associates rooms with the grave—the final, total confinement of death itself.
As living spaces, rooms also seem to stand for a transient and unstable mode of living. The speaker has inhabited a series of mere rooms, not homes. (And those rooms have been in different countries—France, Switzerland, etc.—so they've clearly moved around a bit.)
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The Sea
The sea, or "tide," in lines 4-5 can be interpreted in a few different ways.
First, tides are cyclical, so they often symbolize repetition. It's possible that the speaker finds the ocean's sound "maddening" because it echoes the repetitiveness of their own life.
Paradoxically, the sea is also an ancient symbol of time and change (due to the movement of tides, erosion of shores, etc.), so the speaker may view it as a disturbing reminder that time is slipping by. Perhaps the "damp[ness]" and "seaweed smell" of the room near the shore makes them feel as if their life is decaying or worn down. (Notice the references to death in the following lines.) Tides can also flood or engulf things, so they might correspond to the speaker's feeling of being overwhelmed—metaphorically drowning.
Finally, the sea represents the vast, untamed power of nature, which the speaker implicitly contrasts with the small, tame rooms in which they've spent their life. The tidal sound may be "maddening" because it evokes a power and freedom the speaker has never known.
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“Rooms” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Parallelism
The poem uses parallelism three times: first to create a list and then to create two antitheses. Together, all this parallel phrasing lends the poem a feeling of monotony that evokes the repetitiveness of the speaker's life.
First, lines 3-4 present a succession of phrases beginning "The room" or "The [...] room":
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell [...]This structure (which is also an example of the device anaphora) allows the speaker, who is reminiscing about "Rooms," to offer a series of examples in a clear, logical fashion. Line 6 then contains a minor instance of parallelism: the antithetical phrase "for good or for ill." This is an old-fashioned, but still idiomatic, version of the expression "for better or for worse."
In both of these examples, parallelism creates the sense that specifics don't really matter to the speaker. The speaker is simply slotting different locations and scenarios into the same linguistic structure; whether the room was in Paris or Geneva, and whether good or bad things happened there, readers get the sense that it's all the same to the speaker. This person's life has felt claustrophobic and disappointing time and time again.
Parallelism returns at the very end of the poem, in the form of two phrases beginning with "in the" and set off by a dash:
[...] Out there in the sun—in the rain.
Again, parallelism allows for a direct antithesis, or juxtaposition of opposites. In the "quieter, dustier bed" of the grave (line 9), the speaker and their roommate will sleep through both good weather and bad. The world will still have its ups and downs, but they won't matter anymore. Again, parallelism suggests that it's all the same to the speaker.
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Repetition
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Imagery
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Alliteration
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Metaphor
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Caesura
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Enjambment
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“Rooms” 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.
- Ill
- Geneva
- Ceaseless
Ill-
Bad. "For good or for ill" means the same thing as "for better or for worse."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Rooms”
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Form
"Rooms" is a 10-line, single-stanza poem. While it does use meter and rhyme, the meter varies considerably (it's best described as a kind of rough accentual verse; more on that in the Meter section of this guide) and the rhyme scheme is also rather unorthodox (more on that in Rhyme Scheme). The poem's line length also varies quite a bit; the shortest line (line 10) has eight syllables, while the longest (line 8) has 19. In other words, the poem doesn't follow the rules of any traditional form.
These formal choices serve the poem's meaning in a number of ways. Since they're unconventional, they might suggest that the speaker is indifferent to social conventions. (In many ways, the speaker seems to have given up on life, so maybe they're not too worried about keeping a strict pattern of meter or rhyme.) The unpredictable rhythm and rhymes might also reflect the instability of the speaker's life (with its moves to various "rooms"), or even some instability in the speaker's mental state (given the poem's hints of "mad[ness]" and despair).
They might also reflect the restlessness of a speaker who's spent their life cooped up in "rooms," or at least remembers their life that way. It's helpful to know, in this context, that the word stanza comes from an Italian word for "room." The poem itself is confined to a single stanza, or room, and in a way, it tries to squeeze a whole life's experience into that cramped little space. It also seems to rebel against its own formal parameters, shifting in and out of rhyme and varying meter and line length wildly—to the point where the long eighth line seems to be trying to break the pattern altogether!
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Meter
The poem's meter fluctuates along with its line length and rhyme pattern. Lines 1-7 contain about 10 syllables apiece and might be categorized as four-beat accentual verse. That means each line has roughly four strong stressed beats, but the placement of those stressed beats varies from line to line:
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,Even this pattern shifts around somewhat; for example, lines 6 and 7 could have four or five strong stresses apiece, depending on whether you read the phrases "things died" and "we (two)" as having one strong stress or two. Here's one possible reading:
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,In lines 8-10, the pattern goes haywire. It's possible to read line 8 as containing nine strong stresses, line 9 as containing seven, and line 10 as containing only three. The syllable count jumps around, too, from 19 to 16 all the way down to eight:
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.Again, it's as if the speaker feels as confined by the poem's structure as by their room and is still fighting it on some level even as they seem to have given up.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's single stanza has an unusual rhyme pattern:
AABCDDEFEF
In other words, you could divide it into a rhymed couplet ("part"/"heart"), an unrhymed couplet ("Geneva"/"smell"), another rhymed couplet ("tide"/"died") and a quatrain with alternating rhymes ("dead"/"again"/"bed"/"rain"). There's no name for this pattern; it seems improvised and organic, as if the speaker (or poet) doesn't want to be boxed into a rhyme scheme any more than they want to be trapped indoors.
All of the poem's rhymes are perfect, although the final rhyme pair—"again"/"rain"—might seem more or less exact depending on the reader's accent. Much like the wild metrical variations in lines 8-9, the inclusion of two unrhymed lines (3-4) suggests that the poet is to some degree rebelling against all the poem's formal constraints. This makes even more sense when readers realize that the word "stanza" comes from the Italian for "room." The poem may be confined to one stanza, but it's restless within that confinement!
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“Rooms” Speaker
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The speaker of "Rooms" is a reticent, slightly mysterious, and very unhappy figure.
The speaker starts the poem by reminiscing ("I remember [...]"), but by the end, they've revealed very few personal details. They never disclose their gender, age, nationality, occupation, and so on, nor do they give any hint as to the major events in their life. They suggest that they've lost some earlier energy, vitality, or passion, but they never explain why this happened or how rooms helped cause this "steady slowing down of the heart." Most surprisingly, they never specify the nature of their relationship with their current roommate, the other half of the pair described as "we (two)."
The few details they do provide suggest the faint outlines of a personal narrative. The speaker has moved around a bit, in Europe and possibly elsewhere; they've lived in "Paris," France; "Geneva," Switzerland; and somewhere near or beside the sea (the "sound of the tide"). They've experienced a series of losses; "things died" in their former rooms. (Even here, it's not clear whether people died or just things—hopes or relationships, for instance.) They now share a room with someone else, and both roommates feel terribly depressed or bored: metaphorically, they "lie dead," and might as well be asleep when they're awake. This could be a couple that has lost all romantic passion, but it could also be a pair like Charlotte Mew and her sister Anne, whom Mew nursed through terminal cancer during the last year of Anne's life.
It's unclear how closely the speaker of "Rooms" is based on the poet herself. The poem could be read either as autobiographical or as a monologue in another character's voice (Mew wrote several such monologues throughout her career). The speaker is so sparing with personal information that it's hard to say for sure. For more biographical context, see the Context section of this guide.
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“Rooms” Setting
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The setting of "Rooms" is—you guessed it—a series of rooms! These are various places the speaker has lived in over the years, apparently while moving around Europe or the wider world. For example, they've lived in "Paris," France, "Geneva," Switzerland, and someplace beside or near the sea: "The little damp room with the seaweed smell, / And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide."
As that last phrase suggests, the speaker wasn't necessarily happy in these settings. If they enjoyed the beautiful, glamorous cities of Paris and Geneva, they don't say so explicitly. And they seem to have hated the room near the sea: the sound of the waves drove them crazy (figuratively or literally).
The speaker's current setting is a room they live in with another person. The relationship between these two characters is unclear: are they lovers? spouses? family? Regardless, they're so weary, listless, and/or depressed that they seem to "lie dead." Waking or sleeping, they feel so detached from life that they might as well be in the grave—the metaphorical "bed" or room they're headed toward.
The description of all these rooms is sparse or nonexistent, and that's part of the poem's point. The reader has no way of knowing how large these rooms were/are, what they looked like, or whether they might have contributed in any way to the speaker's unhappiness. In the end, they were rooms first and foremost: confined, domestic spaces as opposed to, say, the wild outdoors. Something in the speaker's personality, life experience, or social context seems to make them unhappy regardless of their setting at any given time.
Finally, the poem isn't explicitly tied to any historical period; its few concrete location markers are either centuries old (Paris and Geneva) or as old as the earth itself (the "ceaseless" tide). As a result, the poem's setting and voice seem "timeless"—appropriately enough, since the speaker feels detached from the ordinary world. In fact, the speaker feels almost as if they're in the most timeless setting of all: the grave.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Rooms”
Literary Context
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was born in Victorian England and lived into the age of literary Modernism. In some respects, her poems are relatively traditional (they use both meter and rhyme); in others, they're experimental and idiosyncratic, incorporating unusual rhythms, syntax (word arrangement), and personas. Her body of work was small—only about 70 poems in total—but it won acclaim from some of the major writers of her time, including the poet Ezra Pound, the poet/novelist Thomas Hardy, and the novelist Virginia Woolf.
"Rooms" was published in Mew's posthumous collection The Rambling Sailor (1929). This was effectively Mew's second collection, following The Farmer's Bride in 1916 (which was republished in expanded form as Saturday Market in 1921). It was assembled by Mew's friend Alida Monro after Mew died by suicide in 1928.
The poem's form and style reflect the era in which Mew wrote. Though "Rooms" uses meter and rhyme—the tools that dominated 19th-century poetry, as well as most English-language poetry in earlier centuries—it uses them unconventionally, somewhat like the 20th-century Modernists. Starting in the first decade of the 1900s, many English-language poets began straying from traditional meter and rhyme schemes or abandoning them altogether (writing in free verse). These experimental techniques helped define what is now called "Modernist" poetry.
"Rooms" also contains two lines (8-9: "Though every [...] bed") that are much longer and looser than the others surrounding them; such variations were common in the Modernist verse of Pound, T. S. Eliot, and others, but were highly unusual among earlier generations of poets. In some ways, then, "Rooms" reads like a poem of the Victorian or Edwardian era (the stretch of UK history from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s). In other ways, it reads like a product of the decade in which it was actually published: the 1920s, when Modernism flourished.
Historical Context
"Rooms" doesn't explicitly refer to historical events or contain any details that link it to a particular period. Still, the poem subtly reflects the world Charlotte Mew lived in. Its reticence about personal details (e.g., the relationship between the speaker and their roommate) might partly reflect the repressive, buttoned-up Victorian culture in which she came of age. Since that culture was notably repressive toward women and queer people (Mew appears to have had same-sex attractions), the poet's experience might inform the speaker's feelings of confinement—their view of life as a series of dull "rooms."
Mew's suicide was an especially 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 20s. Shortly before she turned 30, her father died, leaving her family in financial trouble. Her mother died in 1923, and her last surviving, non-institutionalized family member, her sister Anne, died in 1927 after a bout with cancer. Mew lived with and nursed Anne during her illness, and she took her own life a year after Anne's death.
For these reasons, some critics have read "Rooms" as an autobiographical poem. Its terse remark that "things died" (line 6) may stand in for a lifetime of losses, and particular details in the poem can be linked with Mew's experience. For example, Mew did visit Paris (see line 3) at least once; reportedly, she hoped to pursue a romance with a female friend there, but her hopes were disappointed. And it's tempting to read the "two" who "lie dead" in line 7 as Anne and Charlotte herself: the one dying of cancer, the other battling suicidal depression. But because the poem's details are so sparse, and because Mew was also known for her dramatic monologues (poems written in the voice of a character), it's hard to know how true to life "Rooms" is.
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More “Rooms” Resources
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External Resources
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Charlotte Mew's Life and Work — A biography of the poet at the Poetry Foundation.
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More About the Poet — A profile of Mew at the Modernist Archives Publishing Project.
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a reading of "Rooms."
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More by Mew — Browse original editions of Mew's work at the Internet Archive.
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A Meditation on Mew and More — An essay by Eavan Boland that reflects on Mew's life and "the definitions of a poet."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Charlotte Mew
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