Anna Wickham was a British poet born in London in 1883, raised partly in Australia, and later drawn back to England, where she published most of her work in the 1910s and 1920s. Her life was marked by a difficult marriage and struggles with mental health, and her poems often push back against the idea that a woman’s feelings should be hidden, softened, or made convenient. “The Economist” condenses that resistance into four tight lines, turning love into a financial transaction and pain into a commodity.
The poem opens with a strange kind of proof: “It must be true I love you well / Since your light words are whips of Hell.” The logic is deliberately twisted. If someone’s casual, “light” remarks can cause such disproportionate agony, the speaker reasons, then her attachment must be profound. That word “light” is especially cutting because it suggests both flippancy and a lack of weight, yet those words land with the force of “whips of Hell,” a violent image that turns speech into punishment. Tenderness is not the evidence of love here; suffering is.
The next line shifts from private anguish to public exchange: “But who has pain has songs to sell.” Wickham does not pretend that suffering is sacred or separate from money. The near rhyme of “Hell” and “sell” binds agony and commerce together, as if they are versions of the same sound. The title now snaps into focus: an economist calculates what resources can be traded, and here pain itself is the raw material. A woman’s emotional wounds are converted into poems, which are then offered to an audience. The trade may be real, but the poem senses something uneasy in it.
The final line, “My profitable Friends, farewell!”, is both a dismissal and an accusation. The capitalized “Friends” sounds formal, almost corporate, while “profitable” exposes the hidden motive behind their interest. These friends could be readers, patrons, or people who remain close only because her pain yields “songs to sell.” By saying “farewell,” the speaker seems to reject the marketplace, choosing self-possession over performing her suffering for others. Yet the poem is itself a song—shaped, musical, offered to us—so the farewell remains unresolved. Perhaps she cannot fully escape the economy she names.
The construction sharpens that tension. Four lines of iambic tetrameter create a compact, almost verse-like pulse, but the content is anything but soothing. The rhyme scheme—well, Hell, sell, farewell—acts as an envelope, with the first and last lines closing around the two inner rhymes like a contract or a trap. Wickham’s compression is modernist: no wasted syllable, no soft metaphor. In just four lines she turns “songs to sell” into a diagnosis of how emotional life can be priced, packaged, and consumed. The poem matters because it refuses to let either love or art be innocent. It asks whether a woman can own her pain, or only auction it off, and it leaves that question hanging in the rhyme.