Anna Wickham knew how to compress a crisis into a handful of lines. Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, she became Anna Wickham, a poet whose work sits uneasily beside the Georgian and early modernist verse of her time. She wrote from inside a difficult marriage and a society that often dismissed women’s desire as hysteria. That biographical edge matters because “The Meeting” relies on overwhelming emotion held in tight form. It does not explain; it enacts.
The poem turns on a single encounter. The speaker sees “you” and immediately “you went to my head,” a phrase that yokes romantic obsession to alcohol. “You were like wine to my brain” extends that intoxication beyond the heart into thought itself. Then the scene shifts: “I walked in London through the rain, / To see a man who had been ten years dead.” This is the central riddle. The speaker may be going to visit a grave, or perhaps the sight of someone alive has conjured the dead man so vividly that she must walk through the city to meet him again. Either way, the present moment is powerful enough to dissolve a decade. The central idea is not simply grief, but the way pleasure can temporarily erase chronology: memory and desire make the dead present.
The poem’s construction mirrors that suspension. The first four lines form an envelope rhyme — “head” and “dead” clasp the outer frame, while “brain” and “rain” meet in the middle. That enclosing pattern sounds complete, even sealed, like a thought that cannot be escaped. The rhythm also swells and contracts. The opening line has a tipsy, conversational rush, with the repeated “you” and the phrase “went to my head” falling like steps. The fourth line is longer and heavier: “To see a man who had been ten years dead.” The word “dead” lands with a finality that the rhyme with “head” keeps echoing. Then the last two lines break into a couplet: “For pleasure I forgot the years, / Old time, old death, old tears.” The shift from four lines to two feels like a release, a breath after the longer confrontation. The repeated “old” slows the final line to a series of tolling beats, and the rhyme “years” and “tears” ties grief to time.
Key imagery is concentrated and sensory. The wine is not drunk; it is the person seen. The London rain is real weather but also a kind of blurring medium — grief made visible, perhaps, or the tears the speaker has not named until the final line. The phrase “ten years dead” avoids sentimentality by its plain arithmetic: ten years is long enough for mourning to have become a habit, yet one sight of “you” breaks the habit. The word “pleasure” is bold. In many poems about bereavement, pleasure would be shameful or too trivial. Wickham insists on it. Pleasure is the force that lets the speaker forget “Old time, old death, old tears.” That triple phrase piles abstractions together, but the repetition of “old” makes them feel worn and personal, like familiar objects.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to moralize. It does not say the speaker should have remembered the dead man more dutifully or that forgetting is betrayal. Instead, it admits that the living mind can be ambushed by joy, and that such joy can resurrect the dead more convincingly than solemn remembrance. Written in an era when women’s emotions were often expected to be decorous, Wickham’s six lines are intimate and unguarded. They also show her skill at making a tiny lyric feel large: a rainy London street, a ten-year absence, a rush of near-physical intoxication, and a final quiet couplet that balances loss against pleasure. The meeting of the title may be between two people, between the living and the dead, or between the speaker and her own buried feeling. That openness is exactly its power.