Anna Wickham knew what it meant to feel like an outsider. Born in London in 1883, raised partly in Australia, and later moving through London’s bohemian literary circles, she wrote poetry that often sounds like an argument with convention. Her poem “Formalist” belongs to that argument. Written in the early twentieth century, when modernism was beginning to test Victorian poetic habits, it stages a brief, tense quarrel between the desire to sing in an inherited tradition and the suspicion that the tradition may no longer fit.
The poem opens by summoning the dead: “As men whose bones are wind-blown dust, have sung, / Let me sing now!” The speaker claims a place in a lineage of singers, but quickly complicates that claim. What she proposes to sing is a curious list: “gourds, and goads, of honey, and the plough.” These are earthy, rural, almost archaic objects. Gourds and goads suggest harvest and animal labor; honey and the plough suggest sweetness and toil. They read less like a modern subject and more like fragments from an old georgic. Then the speaker confesses, “I am a raw uneasy parvenu, / I am uncertain of my time.” A parvenu is an upstart, someone newly arrived who lacks the ease of an insider. The word “raw” intensifies that condition: exposed, unfinished, unrefined. She has inherited a language of song but feels she has no settled right to use it.
The central question arrives as a metaphor: “How can I pour the liquor of new days / In the old pipes of Rhyme?” The “liquor of new days” is the raw, changing present—modern experience, new freedoms, new anxieties—while the “old pipes of Rhyme” are the inherited vessels of poetic form. The image echoes the biblical warning about putting new wine into old bottles, but Wickham turns it into self-interrogation rather than confident judgment. The poem’s own shape acts out that uncertainty. It does not settle into a regular stanza. Long iambic lines give way to short, urgent outcries like “Let me sing now!” and “I am uncertain of my time.” Rhyme is promised by the word “Rhyme” but never fully delivered: “sung” does not quite answer “now,” “parvenu” refuses to chime with “time,” and the closing “days” and “Rhyme” hover near a rhyme without locking into place. That near-miss is the poem’s point.
Wickham’s language reinforces the dilemma. “Wind-blown dust” makes the old singers so thoroughly dead they are dispersed in the air, yet their song persists. The heavy alliteration of “gourds, and goads” sounds deliberately archaic, while “raw uneasy parvenu” packs self-criticism into three nervous words. “Liquor” suggests ferment, energy, and the risk of bursting old containers. “Pipes” could be organ pipes or wine casks; either way, rhyme becomes both music and storage, a tradition with authority. The capital R in “Rhyme” turns it into a stern personage, an institution the speaker approaches as a newcomer.
What makes the poem significant is its compression. In seven lines, it captures a central anxiety of modern poetry—the fear that inherited forms cannot hold contemporary experience—without resolving it. Wickham does not attack rhyme or abandon it. She stands inside the form and lets it wobble. As a woman poet who often felt marginal in a male-dominated literary scene, her “parvenu” is not just a generational figure but a personal one. The poem matters because it turns formal uncertainty into the subject itself: a song about whether song is possible, poured into pipes that nearly, but deliberately, fail to fit.