Anna Wickham wrote “The Farewell” in the early twentieth century, when women poets were often expected to be decorative rather than direct. Wickham, who spent part of her childhood in Australia before returning to London, became known for a voice that refused to soften emotional truth. Her poems frequently return to the tension between duty and desire, and to moments of separation in which a woman must gather her strength. This lyric is one such moment: a final night that becomes, not a collapse into grief, but a deliberate act of shelter.
The poem’s central drama is quiet. The speaker announces “TO-NIGHT” alone on the first line, giving the occasion a ceremonial weight. Then she adds “For the last time,” a phrase that turns every gesture into a ritual. She does not argue with the ending or beg for its reversal. Instead, she says, “I loose my hair to make a tent about you.” The verb “loose” is key: it suggests a freeing, an unfastening of both hair and role. Her hair is not decorative; it becomes architecture, a small private room. The invitation that follows—“Come, lay your head on my knees”—is gentle rather than desperate. The posture could be maternal, romantic, or both, but it is above all protective.
From that close, bodily image, the poem expands outward. The speaker tells the departing figure, “Your eyes are the lights of a town.” The other person contains an entire bright, living world. In response, “my body is a sheltering hill.” The metaphor moves from the handmade to the geographic, from a tent to solid earth. Then the scope widens again: “Now my hair is a cloud.” Each sentence ends with a full stop, so the images arrive one by one with the clarity of small declarations. The movement from tent to hill to cloud is not random; it enlarges the speaker until she is no longer just a woman saying goodbye but a landscape and finally a sky. The last line reveals the purpose of all this transformation: “To hide you from the inquisitive stars.” The infinitive “to hide” is suspended until the very end, making concealment the poem’s true action.
Wickham writes in free verse, with no rhyme scheme to contain the feeling. The music comes from repeated structures—the “is” statements build a litany—and from the soft consonants of “loose,” “tent,” “cloud,” and “hide.” The rhythm is slow and deliberate, matching the care of someone arranging a final shelter. Against that tenderness, the word “inquisitive” feels sharp. The stars are not romantic ornaments; they are prying, curious watchers. In the context of Wickham’s time, they might even suggest social scrutiny, the gossipy eyes of a world that monitors love, especially a woman’s love. The speaker answers that scrutiny by becoming a curtain. She does not ask the stars to look away; she simply blocks their view.
What makes the poem significant is this reversal of the usual farewell scene. A departing woman is often imagined as passive, tearful, left behind. Wickham’s speaker is the one who constructs space, controls the imagery, and offers protection. She takes a conventional symbol of femininity—long loosened hair—and turns it into something powerful: a tent, then a cloud. The poem also refuses to explain why this is “the last time.” That omission matters because it lets the farewell belong to anyone: a lover leaving, a child growing up, a friend moving on, even life itself ending. What remains constant is the act of guarding. In a short, unhurried lyric, Wickham turns goodbye into a temporary cosmos, a private world built from a woman’s body and will. That is its enduring strength: it does not describe loss as weakness. It describes loss as a moment when love becomes shelter.