Anna Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, was an early twentieth-century poet whose work often cuts against the image of the gentle, decorative woman writer. She wrote during the years when modernism was shaking off Victorian pieties, and her poems are full of arguments about marriage, female independence, and the cost of safety. Her own life was divided between literary ambition and domestic duty, which gives her suspicion of “secure” things a sharp edge. “Song of Anastasia” is small enough to be memorized in a breath, but it stages a large rebellion against the most worn-out promise in romantic poetry: that love will last forever. The title gives the speaker a woman’s name, turning an abstract debate into an intimate address.
The poem opens with a question that already contains its own answer: “Shall I mock you, and tell you that love shall endure.” The word “mock” turns the familiar vow of permanence into an insult. If the speaker promised that love would endure, she would be treating her listener as naïve, because the listener “know[s] the quality of things that are secure.” That phrase is deliberately ambiguous: security may be desirable, but it may also be brittle, dull, or illusory. What matters is that both people in the exchange share that knowledge. Instead of offering false comfort, the speaker asks for something harsher and more honest: “Let love be fierce as lightning, and as brief / As summer-hail, that is a storm’s relief.” The central idea is not that love is worthless, but that its worth may lie in intensity rather than duration. A flash of lightning or a sudden hailstorm can change the atmosphere precisely because it does not last.
The poem’s shape reinforces that argument. The first two lines are long and irregular, as if the speaker is thinking aloud, testing how a lie would sound. The rhyme of “endure” and “secure” links two words the poem treats with suspicion. Then the rhythm gathers itself: “Let love be fierce as lightning, and as brief” has a firm, imperative beat. The line-break after “brief” makes the word hang for a moment before the simile completes itself, so the reader experiences brevity as a pause. Wickham’s imagery stays rooted in weather rather than emotion. Lightning, summer-hail, and storm are natural forces that cannot be owned or stretched beyond their season. Hail is especially striking: it is violent and quick, gone almost as soon as it touches the ground. Yet the final word is “relief,” not “damage.” A storm can release a build-up of heat and tension. The hiss of “summer-hail” and “storm’s relief” also imitates the exhalation after a storm. Fierceness and brevity, the poem suggests, are not love’s failures but its purer form.
What makes “Song of Anastasia” significant is its unsentimental honesty. It uses the intimacy of a lyric to refuse one of love poetry’s oldest consolations. For a woman of Wickham’s generation, the promise of lasting love was often entangled with the promise of lifelong domestic obedience, so the refusal carries a social charge. Calling the poem a “song” gives the speaker a voice without sweetening the message. The four lines themselves behave like the passion they describe: they flash, strike, and stop, leaving behind the cool relief of a hard truth spoken plainly.