Anna Wickham’s “Imperatrix” opens with a question that sounds almost childlike in its directness: “Am I pleasant?” Yet the woman asking it is no child, and she does not ask for reassurance. She commands an unnamed “old Wise” to look into her eyes and test whether he can think of anything but her. Wickham, an Anglo-Australian poet who wrote in London during the years around the First World War, often turned the conventions of romantic verse inside out. She took the pen name Anna Wickham as part of a life that strained against domestic expectations, and her poems frequently give voice to a female speaker who refuses to be admired on someone else’s terms. The title means “empress” in Latin, and from the first line the speaker behaves like one: she grants an audience, issues a demand, and reserves the right to dismiss.
The poem sets two kinds of love against each other. The philosopher is told, “Ah, you remember praise and your philosophy!” That is exactly his failure. He can offer admiration and ideas, but the speaker wants a love that is not mediated by analysis. Her ideal is compressed into the startling image of “a sphere of silence and of light, / Where Love is all alone with love’s delight.” A sphere is closed, perfect, self-sufficient; it has no argument to make. Then the scene shifts abruptly to a woodcutter who is “so weak / With love of me, he cannot speak.” Where the philosopher has too many words, the woodcutter has none at all. The speaker’s repeated question—“am I pleasant, am I pleasant?”—is not a genuine search for an answer but a test of attention. The philosopher thinks about her in the wrong way; the woodcutter simply cannot think beyond her. The central idea is not that the peasant is nobler by class, but that love at its most intense may need to be dumb, immediate, and physical rather than clever.
Wickham constructs the poem as a short dramatic fragment, closer to a theatrical aside than to a conventional lyric. The rhythms stay close to speech, with lines of uneven length that shift from curt questions to the longer, flowing line about the “sphere of silence and of light.” Rhyme appears irregularly, almost as if the speaker lets it happen when she pleases. “See” chimes with “me,” and the closing couplet snaps decisively on “pleasant” and “peasant.” That final rhyme makes the choice feel both witty and inevitable. The dash after “delight” creates a brief pause before the woodcutter enters, as if the fantasy of the sphere lingers for a breath. The diction is deliberately plain: “pleasant” is a mild, old-fashioned word, far smaller than “beauty,” and its repetition turns it into a demand for a very particular kind of recognition. The philosopher is called “old Wise,” a capitalized type rather than a person, while the woodcutter is introduced through the physical fact of his weakness. The word “dumb” in “dumb man” carries its older meaning of speechless, but it also glances at the idea that too much intellect may be irrelevant to desire. Light, silence, and the sphere are the poem’s core images, all suggesting a private world where the lover’s gaze needs no commentary.
What makes “Imperatrix” significant is the sovereignty it grants to the female voice. In an era when women’s desires were often treated as secondary or dangerous, Wickham’s speaker does not ask permission; she judges her suitors and announces her preference. She walks away from the philosopher without apology: “Farewell, philosopher! I love a peasant.” The poem is not anti-intellectual. Rather, it insists that love has its own logic, one that may prefer a wordless devotion to a well-phrased compliment. The title turns that preference into a kind of rule. By casting herself as “Imperatrix,” the speaker crowns her own longing, not a man’s image of her, as the authority in the scene. The result is a small, sharp assertion of female pleasure and power that feels both mischievous and serious.