Anna Wickham was born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, grew up partly in Australia, and returned to London as a young woman, where she became part of the lively Poetry Bookshop milieu. Her poems emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, a period when women’s intellectual lives were often treated as secondary to domestic duty. “The Woman’s Mind” belongs to that early body of work, and its title is deliberately bold: it announces not a single speaker’s passing mood but a claim about a whole way of knowing.
The poem’s argument is compressed into four lines. The speaker begins by setting one kind of knowledge against another: book-learning feels “wearisome,” while she learns “readily from words and looks.” This is not a rejection of intelligence but a relocation of it. Where books present fixed, finished texts, words and looks are live and social; they require another person’s presence. The speaker then asks for that presence to be “as free as air and rain,” elemental and unpossessive. Her answer to such openness is immediate: “I’ll drink, I’ll think, and send you flowers again.” Knowing, here, is physical and reciprocal — she absorbs, reflects, and gives something back. The central idea is that a woman’s mind, as Wickham frames it, thrives in exchange rather than in solitary study, in relationship rather than in abstraction.
The construction mirrors that intimacy. Four lines move in rhyming couplets, “books” answering “looks” and “rain” answering “again.” Those pairings are not decorative; they connect the very terms the poem distinguishes. The rhythm has a conversational iambic flow, but the opening word “Knowledge” strikes with a heavy first syllable, as if the speaker is sighing at the burden of received learning before loosening into speech. Every line is end-stopped, so each gesture — fatigue, preference, request, promise — arrives with clarity. The word “wearisome” matters: it suggests exhaustion, not contempt. The speaker is not angry at books; she is tired of knowledge that demands no living relationship. Meanwhile, the imagery is elemental and social. “Air and rain” cannot be owned; they fall on everyone. “Drink” turns thought into thirst. “Flowers” may be read as a metaphor for the poem itself, a small beautiful return offered after the speaker has taken in what she needs. “Again” hints that this is not a single transaction but a cycle of attention and gratitude.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet refusal of a single standard of intelligence. In Wickham’s time, educated women were often expected to imitate male models of learning or to treat literature as polite ornament. Wickham does neither. She insists that emotional and interpersonal knowledge — reading faces, hearing tones, accepting freedom, returning gifts — belongs at the center of a woman’s mental life. This is a feminist gesture because it values the intimate and the domestic without ranking them below the academic. It also feels modern in its suggestion that knowledge depends on connection. For all its brevity, the poem is not fragile. It has the confidence of a writer who has thought through the alternatives and made her choice. The final image of sending flowers turns the poem into part of the exchange it describes: a small gift, offered freely, to anyone willing to meet the speaker on equal ground.