Anna Wickham wrote at a time when a woman’s desire was expected to be silent, or at best ornamental. Born in 1883, she moved through London’s early modernist circles, and her first collection, The Contemplative Quarry, appeared in 1915, the year after Britain entered the First World War. In that climate of public heroism and private strain, Wickham gave close attention to the intimate battles of women’s lives. “Susannah in the Morning” is one such close attention: a compressed dramatic lyric in which a woman looks back at the moment she met a lover and unravels the power, performance, and suppressed fire of that meeting.
The speaker begins by describing herself as “chaste and good,” but the words do not sound serene; they sound like a condition the man immediately challenged. He “pardoned not the mood,” she says, as if her initial resistance or fear was an inconvenience to his ruthless desire. From the first quick look, she knew him “dear” and paid him “the highest tribute of my fear.” Here fear is not mere terror; it is the awe that can accompany attraction, but it also carries danger. To survive that danger, she “played woman to his male,” performing the role he expected so that his power could prevail. The verb “played” is crucial: the performance is conscious, and underneath it lies something he does not see.
That hidden something surfaces in the middle lines. His “hot sense”—a phrase that reduces male desire to instinct—shows “quick surprise” at “the slow challenge of my shaded eyes.” The contrast between hot and slow, quick and shaded, marks the poem’s central tension: he wants a simple conquest, while she holds a deeper, more deliberate fire. The “closed room” then becomes a place of possibility as much as confinement; “what fires may burn” there is half a question and half a threat. But the lover has gone cold. The speaker’s cry, “O my cold lover will you not return?” turns the poem into a plea, not for domination, but for the intensity she once felt.
The poem’s form echoes this movement from control to longing. Six closed couplets promise neatness, and the rhymes—good/mood, dear/fear, male/prevail, surprise/eyes, burn/return, prayer/air—bind the argument tightly. Yet the line lengths shift; the opening pentameter contracts into shorter, quicker lines, as if the speaker’s composure is cracking under the pressure of what she is admitting. “In a closed room what fires may burn!” bursts out with an exclamation that the surrounding couplets can barely contain. The final couplet leaves the room entirely.
Wickham draws on the biblical name Susannah, traditionally a figure of chastity and male voyeurism, and gives her an inner morning: an awakening. The “shaded eyes” suggest both concealment and veiled invitation. The final image—the “Master of chariots, drive me in the air!”—mixes prayer, myth, and erotic transport. It recalls the chariots of classical gods and the biblical chariot of fire, but its energy belongs to the speaker. The final prayer is ambiguous enough to be both a longing for escape and a cry for ecstasy, and that ambiguity is exactly the point. After a poem of closed rooms and shaded looks, she asks for release into open night air.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to let female desire be a simple secret or a simple sin. It names the theatre of gender—“I played woman to his male”—and then shows what that theatre cannot hold. In twelve lines, Wickham moves from chastity through performance to a cry for transcendence, making the private morning of Susannah feel both urgent and universal.