Anna Wickham wrote “Resolution” in the early twentieth century, when women poets were still expected to be graceful, domestic, and safely decorative. Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in London and raised partly in Australia, Wickham returned to England to study music, married, raised children, and published alongside the emerging modernist voices of the 1910s. Her poems often sound like a person pushing against the walls of marriage, motherhood, and convention. “Resolution” belongs to that struggle. It is not a polite reflection but a statement of intent: the speaker refuses the small, familiar subjects of a house or a tree and insists on drawing “very Me.”
The poem’s central claim is that the artist’s real subject is the self in full, not the trimmed version that pleases others. When the speaker says she will draw “Everything I think, everything I see,” she binds imagination and perception together, making her inner life as visible as any landscape. Then she turns to the social pressures that usually shrink that life. She will have “no shame,” and no “hope of praise nor fear of blame.” Those emotions, she says, are “mean things, and the same,” because hoping for praise and fearing blame are both ways of being controlled by an audience. The resolution to stand outside approval and punishment is the heart of the poem.
The structure supports this declaration through tight, rhyming triplets. Each stanza is three lines, and each triplet shares a single rhyme sound: tree, Me, see; shame, blame, same; laws, cause, pause. This gives the poem the quality of a vow or riddle, as if the speaker is binding herself to her own terms. The first line of the opening stanza is the longest, but the second line collapses into four emphatic words, “I will draw very Me,” with the capital “Me” turning the self into a proper noun, a place or monument worthy of representation. The third line then expands again into a sweeping claim. That movement—long, short, expanding—creates a rhythm of contraction and release, as though the speaker takes a breath and then lets her vision widen.
Wickham’s language also shifts from the ordinary to the mythic. The house and the tree are deliberately plain, almost childlike objects, the kind of thing a modest artist might draw without risk. The final stanza reaches beyond them: “I am the product of old laws, / Old effect of old cause.” Here the speaker admits she is shaped by inheritance, history, and perhaps the constraints of being a woman. Yet that admission does not defeat her. The line that follows is mysterious and powerful: “The thing that is, may make the blind gods pause.” That “thing that is” may be the fully expressed self, the poem, or a life lived without shame. It has enough force to interrupt even indifferent gods. The word “blind” suggests fate or power that cannot see, while “pause” implies that human creation can still make the universe hesitate.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to be modest. In an era when women’s art was often treated as a hobby, Wickham turns a small lyric into a manifesto for the right to be complicated, visible, and unashamed. Instead of asking permission, the speaker simply announces her resolve. The poem matters because it names the quiet censorship of shame and praise and walks away from both. Its final image is not a woman shrinking from judgment but a self so real that even blind divinities must stop and notice. That is the difference between drawing a house and drawing “very Me.”