Anna Wickham’s “The Call” arrives as a short, urgent invitation, but it was written from a world of long constraints. Wickham, an early twentieth-century British poet who moved between England and Australia, spent much of her life caught between the roles of wife, mother, and artist. Her poetry returns repeatedly to women’s domestic confinement and the longing for a freer emotional and creative life. In “The Call” that longing becomes a direct address to a lover: leave the suffocating interior, step into the open air, and recover a love that feels both natural and sacred.
The first half of the poem builds a small, stale interior. The speaker does not say “my house” but “little houses,” making the home seem diminished and ordinary, a place of repetitive human making. “Dim walls of old restraints” fuses architecture with psychology: the walls are not only poorly lit but built from inherited rules. The third line grows heavier and slower, “Heavy with odorous griefs and melancholy plaints,” where “odorous” suggests air that has been breathed too many times, full of old sorrows and complaints. Then the stanza collapses into a four-syllable image, “Cob webbed with sighs,” as if even breath has become sticky, trapped in corners. These choices turn domestic space into a physical symptom of emotional suffocation.
Against that interior, “The Call” sets a field. The invitation is deliberately modest: “Let us find a field where a quiet cow browses.” This is not a grand wilderness but a working, wind-cleaned landscape where life simply goes on. The cow’s quiet browsing suggests calm, unforced existence. The phrase “wind-swept to clean content” answers the earlier heaviness with movement and clarity, and the word “clean” directly scrubs against “odorous,” “dim,” and “cob webbed.” The closing claim, “we will love there as God meant, / Under free skies,” is quietly radical. It relocates divine blessing from the domestic sphere to the open field, insisting that true love needs space and freedom rather than walls and restraint.
Formally, the poem enacts its argument. It moves between long, clogged lines and short, clipped ones; the weighty third line nearly overflows, while “Cob webbed with sighs” feels abruptly breathless. Rhymes and half-rhymes create quiet transformations across the poem: “houses” reaches toward “browses,” “sighs” becomes “skies,” and “content” settles against “meant.” The sounds are not locked into a rigid pattern, which suits a poem about leaving rigid structures. The direct imperatives, “Walk out” and “Let us find,” give the language a spoken, companionable urgency rather than a decorative tone.
What makes “The Call” significant is the way it uses a small lyric to challenge a large cultural ideal. At a time when women’s lives were often defined by the home, Wickham voices the need to walk out of inherited domestic roles and recover love as something airy, natural, and divinely intended. The poem remains striking because its freedom is not abstract; it is felt in the contrast between stale walls and open skies, between a sigh caught in cobwebs and a field swept clean by wind.