Anna Wickham's "The Contemplative Quarry": XII

I am reading Jennifer Vaughan Jones's biography of Anna Wickham alongside the poems. Quite horrified to learn that her husband committed her to a mental asylum for no reason other than the suspicion of an illicit liaison, her emotional outbursts and her stubborn desire to write poetry. In one of these outbursts, from the garden, Anna had shouted at Patrick her poem "Nervous Prostration," which begins:

I married a man of the Croydon class
When I was twenty-two,
And I vex him, and he bores me
Till we don't know what to do!
It isn't good form in the Croydon class
To say you love your wife,
So I spend my days with the tradesmen's books
And pray for the end of life...

Little wonder that Patrick was angered by Anna's poetry, an anger easily transmuted into a "concern" for Anna's sanity. Though Anna suffered much fear and many indignities in Brooke House, the asylum, she secretly carried out of it at the end of her time there 80 poems she had written. These were to form the core of the collection "The Contemplative Quarry," published by Harold Monro, of The Poetry Bookshop, who became a staunch supporter of Anna's poetry.

Jones's biography discovered an intriguing link between Monro and Brooke House. The mental asylum, a long-established and well-run concern, was one of the sources of Monro's income, and so gave him the financial independence to promote the profitless business of poetry. Jones could not determine if Monro knew of Anna when she was in Brooke House. The doctor who gave Anna paper to write her poems could have told Monro of his unusual patient, knowing Monro's interest in poetry, but nothing can be proven. What is clear is the irony that the man who owned the mental asylum also owned the press and the bookstore.

"XII The Affinity" is about Anna's marriage to Patrick, but in at least one stanza it gains additional resonance when Monro is brought into the picture. The poem begins with great bitterness:

I have to thank God I'm a woman,
For in these ordered days a woman only
Is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

The compulsion in "I have to" is both external and internal, or, more accurate, external pressure changed into internal willfulness. "Ordered" is sharp choice of word, for it connotes not just "orderly" (as in the regimentation of a mental asylum) but also "being ordered around." "Very hungry" and "very lonely," two different conditions, can be read as appositives for each other, due to the missing "and." I find the stark language utterly compelling. The same language animates the rest of the poem:

It is sad for Feminism, but still clear
That man, more often than woman, is a pioneer.
If I would confide a new thought,
First to a man must it be brought.

These lines make me think of Harold Monro as well as Patrick Hepburn, her husband. Does Anna have Monro, her publisher and supporter, in mind too?

The poem goes on to argue in crystal-cut quatrains that "the true male never yet walked/ Who liked to listen when his mate talked," and so the speaker-wife has learned from "a wealth of living" that she "must be silent, if [she] would be loved."

The poem turns at this point, for it realizes that female silence is a potential source of strength: it forces her to do all her thinking "by stealth," like the early Christians who pray secretly in the catacombs. If she were allowed to speak, "the things [she] spoke/ Would fill the air a while, and clear like smoke." Forbidden to speak, she has to write down her thoughts and so she can "show them to the Town," and not just to a husband, and so she can "re-read" her own thoughts in the future. I find immensely moving the idea that writing, for this woman, is not just for a public audience, but also for her private self.

The poem ends by repeating the opening tercet, which is a line shorter than the quatrains in the poem's body, and so enacts the diminishment that the stanza describes:

I have to thank God I'm a woman,
For in these ordered days a woman only
Is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

I said "diminishment," but Anna Wickham made much of little.

Anna Wickham's "The Contemplative Quarry": V

Sorry, everyone, for disappearing for days. First, saying goodbye to Singapore took up the time, and then Pride weekend in NYC. The new legislation for gay marriage was too exciting to stay indoors.

But back to Ms. Wickham. The fifth poem "Need to Rest" begins with an arresting claim:

I have no physical need of a chair

Not sure if she needs the word "physical" but it is there to contrast with the mental need she describes later in the poem. Why does she not need a chair? Because

I can double my body anywhere

Yes, witty follow-up. The body can find rest in itself, by acting upon itself, "doubling" as it were. Self-reliant, it can rest on a "stone" or the "ground," no chair necessary. But what the speaker needs is to "feed my wit/ With beauty and complexity." The emphasis here is on the feeding, and not the having. For if she thinks she already possesses "philosophy," then she were "high man without complexity." "Man" here means primarily humans, but I think by using "man" she also takes a dig against male complacency at having the answers to life. The complacent man, the "high" man, would fling himself on "any natural sod/ To scan the zenith and remember God." In other words, the "high" man would rest on his possession of wisdom. When he scans the zenith, he does not discover anything new, but merely remembers the old idea of God.

This reading about human complacency is confirmed by the next lines:

But it is needful man shall strive
With tortured matter, so to keep alive.

Life, for Wickham, resides in striving with tortured matter, and not with resting on any natural sod. It is a dynamic philosophy of will, not a static wisdom of possession. After this statement of its point--its need--the poem goes on to elaborate in six uninspired lines:

Idle man would never live to age:
He would run mad and die in rage.
When fat accumulations cloy,
War brings her sword to ravage and destroy,
That through the smoke of the consuming real
Man sees a clearer and more sure ideal.

The boldness here lies in the thought of war as a necessary destructive force to wake man to his ideal life of constant strife, but the expression of the thought is mundane and clumsy. The rhymes cripple the poetry.

Returning to the beginning of the poem, I now find it rather misleading. The central contrast in the poem is between those who rest in complacency and those who ever strive. The opening lines, however, posits a contrast between resting in a chair, and resting without a chair. I think this misdirection is caused by the common problem of discovering an arresting start for a poem, and then wandering away from it in the subsequent argument. One is naturally reluctant to delete the wonderful opening that gives rise to the poem, even if it does not lead logically into it. Wickham's editor comments that she seldom revised her poems. Her poems show the freshness of spontaneity, as well as its flaws.

From Anna Wickham's "The Contemplative Quarry": II-IV

The next three poems, increasingly longer and more complex in thought, express Anna Wickham’s views of her art.

In “II The Singer,” the speaker does not have peace to sit and sing, but is “stung with goads and whips,” and so instead of making a lovely poem, she builds songs “like iron ships.” Goads and whips evoke horses and chariots, and so subtly prepare for seafaring vessels. Since the next poem refers to the old Greek myths, it is not too far-fetched to think that by “iron ships” Wickham had in mind Homer’s “hollow ships.” All this is to point out that the imagery in the quatrain is more martial than it may first appear. The poem concludes with a modest but affecting wish, built in a sturdy tetrameter couplet.

Let it be something for my song.
If it is sometimes swift and strong.

“III New Waters” is less successful a song. It is clunky and chockfull of abstractions: it is not sufficiently imagined. The speaker rejects the Greek myths as tales “over-told.” By a “new risen Attic stream,” a mortal singer dreamed a new dream.

There are new waters, and a new Humanity.
For all old myths give us the dream to be,
We are outwearied with Persephone,
Rather than her, we’ll sing Reality.

The quadruple end-rhyme is simply awful. The use of “we” is utterly unjustified: it loses the peculiar sympathy that Wickham usually elicits from a reader.

“IV The Egoist,” consisting of four stanzas, is structured as a somewhat rhetorical question and three answers of increasing depth. The speaker asks, in the first stanza, if she should write “pretty poetry” that is “Controlled by ordered sense” in her and with “an old choice of figure and of word.”

Her first answer is that she can make a “synthesis” of the dead poets and learn “poetic form” from them, but she will use the figure “that is real/ For me, the figure that I feel.” Intriguing here is her distinction between form and figure. I wonder from whom she got her terms. It seems Romantic to me to gloss “real” with “that I feel.” The desire to be both traditional and individual reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” (Is “synthesis” a self-consciously modern word, like the “objective correlative” and the chemistry images in Eliot’s essay?) But Eliot’s example shows that to be truly individual one needs not only individual figure (“Where the evening spreads against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table.”) but also individual form (like the disjunctive music of “The Waste Land”). Anna’s formal innovations are a smaller individuality.

She argues against ear-perfect rhyme in her second answer/stanza, but in a spirit of concession. She is not a “clerk” who “can list all language in his leisure time.” She does not have all the time in the world, but in her haste she can seize a pleasing infelicity. Or, as she puts it:

A faulty rhyme may be a well-placed microtone,
And hold a perfect imperfection of its own.

The balance in the couplet is reminiscent of Pope in “An Essay on Criticism,” although the couplet is in hexameter. But the diction, the figure of “micro-tone," sounds the modern note.

The last answer/stanza is the most general and philosophical. She drops her self-deprecation and asserts “A poet rediscovers all creation.” “Creation” here may refer to both Nature and Poetry. That a poet traces the lineaments of Nature in her poems is a Romantic idea. That a poet traces the lineaments of all past poetry in her poems smacks of Modernism. In this process of re-discovering, the poet’s “instinct” gives him “beauty,” which Wickham glosses aptly as “sensed relation.”

Then in a beautiful break-away from the common measures of five and six stresses, the poem concludes and justifies itself:

It was as fit for one man’s thoughts to trot in iambs, as it is for me,
Who live not in the horse-age, but in the day of aeroplanes, to write my rhythm free.

The penultimate line has nine stresses, the last has eleven. She won through to a small but significant freedom.

From Anna Wickham's "The Contemplative Quarry": "I Amourette"

The poems in Wickham’s second book (1915) are numbered as well as titled, giving the appearance of a sequence. Though the poems focus on recurring themes, they are written in different stanzaic forms, most often as a single stanza. They often rhyme in couplets too. This marriage of strict numbering and varied forms creates an impression of great spontaneity.

“I Amourette” is a dialogue between the Woman and the Philosopher. Unusual to the dialogue form is a kind of prelude in which the two speakers talk to themselves about the other before they join in “argument.” The Woman asks herself how she can please man best. Two options present themselves: “Shall I be silent? Shall I speak?” The Philosopher does not question himself but rather questions whether a woman can be wise when “her philosophy is but a lure.” The Philosopher thus sees wisdom as antithetical to love, or, more generally, feeling. He does not want his wisdom to fall to the “arsenal of charm” and the “ammunition of her thought.”

Desiring the “thrilling combat of the wit,” the Woman confesses to the Philosopher in sadomasochistic terms that she takes “strange delight” in being “beaten,” this right at the start of their argument. He rightly identifies her as a “sensualist” and kisses her. She teases him by calling his forwardness at their first meeting “husbandry,” a loaded word. She promises him that from this “first pleasure” that he “sows” in her, she has the power to raise a shady grove for him. It is interesting here that the poet assigns masculine imagery to the Woman as well as the Philosopher.

Charmed by her answer, the Philosopher promises to return another night. The Woman concludes the dialogue with a complicated wish:

Dreams, dreams, stay with me till I sleep,
Then let oblivion steep
My senses in forgetfulness,
That when I wake, I may forget my loneliness.

Does “dreams” refer to the dream of the philosopher’s return or does it indicate that the charmed philosopher was a dream, an impossibility? It is disturbing to describe sleep as “oblivion,” especially in the context of a philosophical dialogue. Finally, does she forget her loneliness when she wakes because she has forgotten the lover during her sleep? If so, she does not seem to have gained her objective at the start of the poem. Is she winner or loser at the end? Wiser or foolish?

Despite the (perhaps unintended) ambiguities, what is clear is the speaker’s intellectual and emotional isolation. She lacks a Philosopher-lover. By referring to her “senses,” she justifies the Philosopher’s description of her as a “sensualist,” and so perhaps feels even more acutely the absence of a man who understands her.

From Anna Wickham's "Songs of John Oland"

According to the editor’s note, many poems of this privately printed collection (1911) were reissued in later volumes. This selection of 14 poems already presents the major themes, which recur in Wickham’s writings. The conflict between men and women is depicted in “Song of the Low-Caste Wife,” “Surrender,” “Divorce,” and “All Men to Women.” The ambition to be a writer appears in “Illusion,” “The Artist’s Life,” and “Inspiration.” The post-Darwin loss of religious faith inspires the poems “The Call for Faith,” “The Song of the Child,” and “The Sinner.” Finally, the theme of motherhood is expressed in “The Song of the Mother,” “The Town Dirge” (about the death of a poor couple’s child), “Outline,” and, most tenderly, in “Song to the Young John,” Wickham’s firstborn.

The poems in this first collection, as indicated in the repetition of “song” in many of their titles, are stirringly lyrical. “Illusion,” the best of the short lyrics, begins with gigantic confidence but soon discovers, by the end of the first stanza, the boundless limits of the world:

I who am great stalk above trees,
And come upon the world from heights.
I kick aside the little boxes of straight built towns,
Those great coveted houses!
Extend my arms to touch the round horizon,
and find the zenith just beyond my fingers.

The thought in the lyrics is not very complex or subtle. The more interesting poems are those that fuse more than a single thematic concern. “The Song of the Mother,” for instance, is about both motherhood and artistic ambition. The speaker warns would-be female poets to take heed of great female poets of the past, who gave up having children in order to produce great poetry, and now “Each rocks herself in mute grief,/ Seeing the vision of the unborn.” In contrast, the speaker hears herself singing a great song “For my children come out to greet me.” Having children, in Wickham’s poem, inspires the making of poems, and does not displace it.

The same faith undergirds the low-caste wife’s reproach of her king-husband in her “Song.” The king’s highborn people have turned merely conservative. They think only of “old victories” and lose “the lust of conquest.” The low-caste wife, however, comes from a people who “sang the song of exile in low places,” and so are “hungry from oppression.” Like her people, the wife is “full of lust”:

Give me for all old things that greatest glory
A little growth.

She has given sons to the king who will give their father the “king-descended” vision that he has lost.

Besides the tones of confidence and reproach, the poems sound other, darker, notes. In “Divorce,” the speaker whose duty is to “nurse” the fire in the house hears a voice from the dark heights calling her. From the hills come the exhilarating martial sounds of drums, and marching men, and a hero’s call. But the speaker can only beg an unnamed someone to let her leave the house. The second stanza goes:

Spirits that ride the sweeping blast,
Frozen in rigid tenderness,
Wait! for I leave the fire at last
My little-love’s warm loneliness.
I smother in the house in the valley below,
Let me out to the night, let me go, let me go.

“My little-love’s warm loneliness” is a neat turn of phrase to describe an isolating marriage. I admire how the anapests in the penultimate line drag the line almost to a halt before the rapid succession of stresses in the last line bangs desperately on the door.

"The Writings of Anna Wickham"

I read Anna Wickham's "The Fired Pot" in the Norton Anthology, and was inspired by it to write a poem during NaPoWriMo. I decided that I had to get to know the woman and the poet better, and so bought a biography as well as The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet, edited by R. D. Smith. The Writings, published to celebrate the centenary of Anna Wickham's birth, includes selections from her published and unpublished poetry, an autobiographical fragment and other prose writings.

The book's front material summarizes the bare facts of a life:

Anna Wickham was born in Wimbledon in 1884. At the age of six she went with her parents to Australia, where she was educated in Brisbane. In 1904 she returned to England and, after a period studying singing at the Paris Opera, she married Patrick Hepburn, a London lawyer and astronomer, in 1905. They had four sons, the first, James, born in 1907: their third son died at the age of five. From 1905 she lived in Bloomsbury and, from 1909 until her death in 1947, in Hampstead. She had a long friendship with the lesbian writer and patron of the arts, Natalie Barney. Other friends, who included Kate O'Brien, Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Ezra Pound, David Garnett, and D. H. Lawrence, often spoke of her immensely powerful effect on people.

Anna Wickham started writing at the age of six, and wrote compulsively, producing over 1400 poems in her lifetime, encouraged by Harold Munro of the Poetry Bookshop and Louis Untermeyer in America. Her collections included Songs of John Oland (1911), The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with the Hammer (1916), The Little Old House (1921). In 1971 her Selected Poems was published by Chatto & Windus. Nevertheless, her neglect by critics is, as Kunitz said, "one of the great mysteries of contemporary literature....

The autobiographical fragment runs to 106 pages and is subtitled "Prelude to a Spring Clean." The house is Anna Wckham's metaphor for her life. It is the domestic arena to which women have traditionally been restricted and against which Wickham fought for the right to write. What complicated this feminist story was Wickham's love for her children. Unlike some women writers, Wickham liked being a mother. In her prose analysis "The Spirit of the Lawrence Women," she defended women's procreative powers against D. H. Lawrence's denigration of it. In theory, a woman could be both writer and mother, but practicality militated against such a fruitful combination, at least in her time.

Her husband, a passionate scholar of Romanesque churches, wanted her to be his muse and audience. Her desire to be a mind in her own right led to violent quarrels in the marriage. Encouraged by her father to win fame as a writer, to compensate for his own failure, and mesmerized by a strong-willed dramatic mother, who carried the family through hard times in Australia, Anna Wickham could not be contented to be any one's wife merely. Her poetry records that determined struggle.