Anna Wickham wrote “The Hermit” in the early twentieth century, first publishing it in her 1916 collection The Man with a Hammer. She was a British poet who moved through London’s literary world without fully belonging to it, and her work often returns to figures who are pushed out, silenced, or forced into isolation. That context matters because “The Hermit” is not simply a fable about bad luck at sea. It is a compressed myth of persecution turning, almost accidentally, into self-possession.
The narrative moves with the speed of a folk tale. A man is hounded by a jeering crowd—“Fools drove him with goads and whips”—until he is pushed onto a ship and carried away from his home. He is, at first, nothing but a victim: he finds himself in “such a dread captivity,” and the poem calls him “the poor slave.” But a storm intervenes with a strangely purposeful violence. A “burning bolt” hits the deck, the ship breaks apart, and the man swims through a suddenly calmed sea to a new coastline. The turn is abrupt and almost supernatural. The storm, which ought to be the worst moment, becomes the rescue. Wickham does not moralize; she lets the rapid couplets do the work, moving from terror to possession in a few lines.
The poem’s construction reinforces that transformation. It uses rhyming couplets throughout—whips/ships, deck/wreck, free/sea, pleasure/treasure—which gives it the plain, singing quality of a ballad. But the line lengths are unstable, shifting from longer lines at moments of coercion to shorter, quicker ones as events accelerate. “Then that ship sailed away / Far from the land that day” has the stripped simplicity of a nursery rhyme, yet the content is exile. Later, “So the poor slave swam free / Over a quick calmed sea” uses that same simple music to signal release. The final couplet is almost epigrammatic: “He took rude tools / And carved a splendid monument to fools.” The word “rude” suggests roughness and lack of polish, but “splendid” elevates the act. The monument is not built for applause; it is a private, defiant response to those who drove him out.
Key words circle and repeat with purpose. “Fools” opens the poem and returns at the end, transforming the crowd from an active threat into an object carved in stone. “Captivity” gives way to “free,” and the phrase “virgin island” shifts the man from refugee to claimant. The island is “his own,” not because he conquered it but because he survived. “Pleasure” and “treasure” rhyme almost too easily, but that ease is earned: the hermit has found value where others saw punishment. The storm imagery—the “rift of flying cloud” and the “burning bolt”—works the same way. It begins as fear and ends as a door opening onto calm water. The poem suggests that the fools’ cruelty did not destroy him; it accidentally delivered him to a place where he could build something lasting.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat suffering as purely tragic. Wickham turns exile into a strange kind of luck. For a poet who often felt herself an outsider—as a woman, as a writer, as a person whose moods could be turbulent—the hermit’s island is a fantasy of autonomy. The shipwreck offers not just escape but a chance to make art from the very narrowness of life. The “splendid monument to fools” is the poem’s final, ironic masterpiece: an insult and a thank-you at once, because the foolish cruelty set him free.