Anna Wickham wrote “Surrender” in the early twentieth century, a period when women poets were beginning to claim direct, bodily experience as a subject worthy of serious art. Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in London and raised partly in Australia, returned to England and moved in bohemian literary circles while raising a family. Her lyrics often explore the tensions between desire, selfhood, marriage, and creative ambition. “Surrender” belongs to that body of work: it is unashamedly intimate, yet it reaches toward something larger than a private confession.
At first reading, the poem seems to celebrate a kiss. The speaker says “When you kiss me I am blind,” and immediately the senses are “filled with ecstasy.” That blindness is not simply loss; it clears the way for a different kind of perception. She does not describe her lover’s face or the surrounding room. Instead, she turns inward and downward: “I only feel how strong my life is, / And so know myself.” The paradox is central to the poem. Losing ordinary sight, she gains self-knowledge. Love becomes a way of reading the world, even beyond the visible: “From love I understand all things that live. / And even the dead.” This is no pretty cliché about romance. The poem claims that passion connects the speaker to something vast and serious—life, death, the whole chain of being.
Wickham builds that expansiveness through elemental similes. The speaker compares herself to “a tree / Shaken in wind,” an image that suggests both force and rootedness, pleasure and vulnerability. Then she becomes “water that is drawn into the air / Through the strong loving of the sun.” Here the physical process of evaporation is made tender and almost sexual. Water does not rise by itself; the sun’s “strong loving” pulls it upward. The natural images keep the poem from feeling merely sentimental. They give intimacy the scale of weather and climate.
The turn comes with devastating simplicity: “When you are gone.” What love gave, absence destroys. The speaker does not feel simply lonely; she becomes catastrophe itself: “I am myself earthquake and eclipse, / And all cold darkness, and rending grief.” These images are cosmic, not domestic. An earthquake shatters the ground; an eclipse blocks the light. The body is not merely sad—it is a landscape in ruin. The word “rending” is especially violent, as if grief tears the speaker apart from within. This is the cost of the surrender named in the title.
Rhythmically, the poem avoids regular meter and rhyme, moving in short, breath-like lines. That freedom allows the emotional shifts to feel immediate rather than rehearsed. The repetition of the opening line near the end—“When you kiss me I am blind. / I am blind!”—does not simply bring the poem full circle. The added exclamation makes the final blindness sound more desperate, more ecstatic, or perhaps more aware of its own danger. The speaker knows that this love makes her powerful enough to understand the dead, yet also capable of becoming an earthquake. Her surrender is total, and the poem does not soften that.
What makes “Surrender” significant is its refusal to separate erotic love from profound knowledge or profound pain. Wickham writes not as an object of desire but as a mind and body experiencing desire’s full force. In a few unrhymed lines, she turns a kiss into an opening onto life and death, and turns absence into an apocalypse. The poem remains striking because it treats a moment of private physical feeling with cosmic seriousness—and because it admits that such intensity can be both revelatory and ruinous.