Anna Wickham’s “Warning” first appeared in the 1910s, a period when women poets in England were beginning to claim short, sharp lyrics for subjects that had usually been treated as delicate or sentimental. Wickham, born in London in 1883 and partly raised in Australia, returned to England as a young woman. Her marriage and motherhood gave her security but also a deep sense of confinement, and she wrote with unusual frankness about female desire and frustration. “Warning” comes out of that tension. It reads not as a conventional love poem but as a message from someone who understands love as a force that can cost a woman her selfhood.
The poem’s situation is announced immediately as prophecy: “The soul shall be drowned in the flood / Of mounting blood.” The future tense is absolute, as if the danger is certain. The “flood” is not made of water but of blood, a word that can mean passion, violence, heredity, or simply the body’s pulse. “Mounting” adds the idea of rising pressure, perhaps sexual arousal, perhaps anger. The soul is the thing at risk, not the body, so the poem frames love as a spiritual emergency. The second half turns into advice: “Be strong at least / To resist Love, / Except at his feast.” Love is capitalized and given a gender, “his,” turning it into a masculine host who invites, tempts, and presides. The speaker does not recommend rejecting Love altogether; she draws a boundary. Strength is needed to resist Love in ordinary life, but at his feast, that resistance may be dropped. The feast may stand for mutual passion or for an appointed moment of surrender. Either way, the poem holds two pressures in balance: love as drowning and love as celebration.
The construction reinforces that balance. Five lines are all; no stanza break slows the warning. The poem’s two rhyme pairs, “flood” and “blood,” “least” and “feast,” create a closed, proverb-like shape, while the unrhymed “Love” sits at the centre as the dangerous exception. The first line is relatively smooth, but the phrase “mounting blood” lands on two heavy stresses, as if the speaker’s pulse has become audible. Then the imperatives are clipped: “Be strong at least” is made up of short words that sound like a decision. The final line opens with “Except,” a word that changes the whole meaning by carving out a ritual space. The long vowel of “feast” gives the ending a strangely ceremonial calm, as if the drowning and the invitation are part of the same event.
The significance of “Warning” lies in that ambiguity. Wickham does not simply warn against love; she warns against love outside its proper season, when it is most likely to overwhelm the soul. This is an unusual message for a woman poet of her era, for whom desire was often treated as a risk to virtue. By personifying Love as a masculine host and allowing an exception at his feast, she suggests that surrender is not weakness if it happens on chosen terms. The poem’s brevity is a kind of strength: it contains a flood in five tiny lines, much as the speaker herself urges self-possession in the face of overwhelming feeling.