Anna Wickham’s “Theft” begins with a hand laid on a corpse — not in final salute but in deliberate, curious touch. Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, moved between England and Australia and published through the 1910s and 1920s, when female desire and female inheritance were often treated as suspect. Wickham wrote at the edge of modernism, where old forms could be bent to new emotional facts. Her poems work on the edge of conventional grief, and this twelve-line piece turns an apparent grave-side robbery into a private ritual of love.
The speaker is not looting a house. Her first theft is almost metaphysical: she reaches to take “that little left in the soul’s mould, / The knowledge of the rigour and the cold.” The body is the mould, the last thing the soul touched, and the speaker wants to know whatever the dead know — the fact of stiffness, the feel of final cold. The gesture is practical and mystical at once. She asks no pardon of “the Clay,” the capitalized matter of the corpse, because “the dead eyes had wandered in their day.” That word “wandered” does a lot of quiet work. It suggests the dead man had already left the paths of strict observance, or at least had known desire and movement, so conventional submission to the body would be false. Kneeling “ceremonious at his side,” she finds a book of verses dropped the day he died. The book is a double object: it falls from the body yet contains speech, occupying the border between corpse and voice. Her response is to repeat those verses “to dead ears in lieu of prayers,” turning reading into a secular funeral rite. Then she steals the book, “regardless of his heirs,” repeating her reason with a subtle shift: the dead man had loved her in his day.
The poem’s six couplets give it a ritual, incantatory feel, as if rhyme itself is a ceremony. The first four lines pair “dead” with “head” and “mould” with “cold,” binding the physical body to the knowledge the speaker wants. But the ninth line stretches: “Verses — which I repeated to dead ears in lieu of prayers.” The dash and the longer rhythm mark the moment where speech replaces prayer, where the dead man’s own words become the only office needed. The repetition of the pardon refusal — first “I asked no pardon,” later “Asking no pardon” — turns a single act into a continuing stance. The language keeps the physical and the symbolic in the same register: “Clay” is simultaneously corpse and earth; “heirs” brings in the legal world of inheritance, which the speaker calmly brushes aside. The slant rhyme of “Clay” and “day” clinches that uneven bargain, half echo and half argument.
What makes “Theft” significant is its moral confidence. The speaker does not ask forgiveness, because the claim she makes is emotional and poetic rather than legal. The stolen book is not a watch or a coin; it is verses, the dead man’s voice still pressed into paper. By stealing it, she takes over that voice, just as she reads his verses aloud to his unhearing ears. The final line, “For the dead man had loved me in his day,” is the poem’s quiet flash of power. “Loved” remains deliberately unclassified — it could be the love of a father, a lover, or even a literary teacher — and that ambiguity lets the poem hold different kinds of grief at once. Wickham refuses to make the bond fit the language of heirs, law, or prayer. In its place she creates a smaller, harder ritual: a touch, a stolen book, a few remembered lines, and a woman who claims the right to keep them.