Charlotte Mew: I so liked Spring

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here; –
The thrushes too –
Because it was these you so liked to hear –
I so liked you.

This year's a different thing, –
I'll not think of you.
But I'll like the Spring because it is simply spring
As the thrushes do. 

From The Rambling Sailor (1929). Charlotte Mew had killed herself the previous year by drinking lysol. She’s remembered as a poet of frustrated lesbian love, but what really marks her poetry is fear of hereditary insanity and a sense of being outcast. The slight “I so liked Spring” is of course only incidentally an animal poem. Another kind-of-animal-poem by Mew is “The Changeling”, which is really remarkable: one of the great Victorian poems of the post-Victorian era.