Anna Wickham was a British poet whose first collection, *The Contemplative Quarry*, appeared in 1915, and whose life was marked by conflict between domestic duty and artistic ambition. Writing in the early twentieth century, when social planners and reformers often imagined a future free of poverty, disease, and emotional disorder, Wickham produced a small lyric that quietly resists such confidence. “Sung to the Social Reformer” answers the promise of a pain-free world with a surprising request: do not take away our tears.
The poem addresses a social reformer directly, as if that figure has offered a future without grief. The speaker does not welcome a world of “too perfect years.” Instead, she pleads, “Leave us our sorrows, / Take not our tears.” The repeated lines sound like a prayer or a lullaby, yet their target is not comfort but the preservation of emotional depth. The word “to-morrows” stretches into “years,” giving the promised future a long, flat horizon. Perfection, the poem suggests, would become a kind of emptiness, because feeling itself would have been engineered away.
The middle stanza makes the argument concrete by turning to two figures at different stages of life. The “New-born” needs the “world-old solace of a cry.” That phrase is especially rich: the cry is both ancient and consoling, not merely a problem to be solved. The newborn’s wail is the first proof of life, an inherited language older than any reform. Then the poem turns to “hot Youth” and its “eternal right / To win his having with a fight.” Here the language is possessive and physical—having, winning, fighting. Wickham implies that desire and struggle are not obstacles to a good life but the very means by which young people claim themselves. If a social reformer removed conflict, he would also remove that claim.
The song-shaped structure supports this idea. The opening quatrain returns at the end almost unchanged, and its rhyme pairs “sorrows” with “to-morrows” and “tears” with “years.” Sorrow belongs to tomorrow, tears to years, as if feeling cannot be extracted from time. The middle stanza uses quick couplets—“deny” and “cry,” “right” and “fight”—so the poem itself seems to move from a soothing refrain to something more urgent, then back again. This movement enacts the balance Wickham wants: not endless pain, but a world in which pain and remedy, struggle and rest, remain in rhythm. The word “sung” in the title matters, too; this is not a lecture but a song, a form used for lullabies, hymns, and love. It asks the reformer to listen, not just to legislate.
What makes the poem significant is how calmly it refuses utopian certainty. Wickham does not attack social reform itself; she questions the desire to make human life flawless. At a time when many thinkers believed society could be rationally improved, and when women’s emotions were often dismissed as weakness, she insists that sorrow and tears have worth. The poem remains potent whenever perfection—whether in politics, technology, or self-improvement—promises to eliminate difficulty. “Take not our tears” is a warning: if you remove the tear, you may also remove the capacity to feel joy, to fight for a future, and to cry out at birth.