Anna Wickham wrote “Inconstancy” in the early twentieth century, at a time when women’s romantic devotion was often imagined as a kind of static worship. Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in London in 1883 and raised partly in Australia, Wickham became part of London’s bohemian poetry scene and was known for writing about love, marriage, and women’s inner lives with unusual candour. The poem appeared in her first collection, The Contemplative Quarry, in 1915, and it speaks to the pressures of an era that expected women to be constant in feeling while Wickham herself often questioned the cost of such constancy.
The poem’s argument unfolds in two six-line stanzas, each built from rhyming couplets. In the first stanza, the speaker remembers a time when her beloved occupied every corner of her mind: “Time was, when I recalled your words, your looks, your deeds.” The simile of the “rapt nun” counting “her blest beads” turns memory into religious ritual, with the beloved’s small details treated as sacred objects. Yet the speaker calls this state “faithless from my faith’s continuance,” because being changeless meant she “gave no obedience.” The personified Love has no room “to work his change in me,” and that absence of change becomes a failure, not a proof of devotion.
The second stanza reverses the picture. After “these long days” of forgetting and walking “unsustained” by the beloved, the speaker returns to thought and discovers that “my action was the thing you taught.” The influence of the beloved has not vanished; it has moved inward and expressed itself through how she lives. The final couplet echoes the first stanza’s rhyme exactly, pairing “continuance” with “obedience,” but now the logic is turned around: “in faithlessness is faith’s continuance,” because in a change the speaker does “all obedience.” What looks like inconstancy — forgetting, independence, self-directed action — is revealed as a deeper fidelity.
The construction reinforces that shift. The lines move in a loose iambic pentameter, with occasional extra syllables that keep the voice conversational, while the couplets lend a measured, almost argumentative pace. The repeated rhymes at the end of each stanza create a hinge between two opposing definitions of love. Words such as “faithless,” “faith,” “continuance,” “change,” and “obedience” recur with reversed meanings, so the poem asks a reader to hold paradox rather than settle for a simple lesson. The religious language of nuns, beads, and obedience frames love as a discipline, yet the poem quietly challenges the idea that devotion means repetition or frozen memory.
What makes “Inconstancy” significant is its refusal to equate faithfulness with staying the same. For Wickham, true continuity may require alteration; the beloved’s presence is proved not by obsessive recollection but by the self one becomes. That idea carries a feminist edge, since it releases the speaker from the role of the woman who must preserve every word and look as if they were relics. Instead, she can live, change, and still remain loyal. The poem invites readers to see inconstancy not as betrayal but as the movement through which love survives time.