Anna Wickham’s “Return of Pleasure” reads like a small manifesto for creative recovery. Wickham, an English poet born in 1883, spent much of her writing life in the shadow of early twentieth-century modernism and also in a personal struggle with marriage, motherhood, and mental illness. She began publishing in the 1910s, a time when poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were reshaping poetry through experiment and allusion, but Wickham’s voice remained more direct and personal. Her poems often show a sharp, restless intelligence pushing against silence, and this one is no exception. The speaker begins in despair: “I THOUGHT there was no pleasure in the world / Because of my fears.” The brevity of those two lines makes the fear feel like a sealed room. Then the mood turns. Memory of “life and all the words in my language” restores not just comfort but courage, enough courage “even to despise form.” That phrase is not an attack on all structure; it is a refusal to let inherited rules dictate what can be said.
The central idea is a reclaiming of pleasure through permission. The speaker stops measuring words by their “genealogy” and things by their “association.” She asks, “Why should I scorn a bus rather than a ship?” The question sounds almost funny, but it points to a real literary prejudice: the ship, with its romantic voyages and classical echoes, has long been considered poetic; the bus, ordinary and modern, has not. Wickham argues that this hierarchy is arbitrary. If a poet has “skill to make words dance,” she can put “myself, and everything I see, upon the page” without waiting for approval from tradition.
The poem’s form enacts its argument. It moves in free verse, with no regular rhyme or meter to lock it down. The opening lines are clipped and heavy; after the turn, the lines lengthen as thought and courage expand. The playful rhythm of “To clap hands and to shake feet” gives the idea of dancing words a physical, almost childlike energy. The repeated “Why should I…” questions build like a series of doors being pushed open, and because there is no rhyme to close each question neatly, the lines keep their open, speculative quality. Key words do quiet work: “fears” at the start sets up the problem; “courage” answers it; “words,” “page,” “genealogy,” and “association” turn the poem into a conversation about poetic material. The image of placing “everything I see” on the page is deliberately flat and inclusive, rejecting the notion that only elevated subjects belong in art.
What makes the poem significant is the way it connects artistic freedom to daily life. Wickham wrote at a time when modernism was breaking old forms, but not every poet was welcomed into that rebellion. Her speaker’s fear is both personal and cultural: the sense that certain words, subjects, and selves are not allowed. By declaring that a bus deserves its place alongside a ship, she opens poetry to the ordinary world. The poem is also a quiet feminist statement, because it insists that a woman’s immediate experience and perception are enough material for art. The “return of pleasure” is not a luxury; it is the result of refusing to be ashamed of one’s own language and surroundings. The last question lingers not as doubt but as an invitation: once you stop scorning the bus, what else might you let into the poem?