Anna Wickham, born in 1883, was one of the more sharply honest poetic voices of early twentieth-century Britain. Writing at a time when women were campaigning for the vote and questioning the confines of marriage, Wickham turned private frustration into taut, often bitter lyric poems. Her own married life was difficult, and she wrote with unusual directness about female desire, domesticity, and the longing for creative and emotional freedom. "Necromancy" belongs to that world: it is a compact spell for an imagined perfect lover, followed by a cold return to reality.
The poem’s basic situation is conditional from the start: "If she could take two types of man, / Man that she loves, and man that she desires," the speaker says, she might combine them in a "magic pan" over "holy fires." The title suggests conjuring the dead, but here the magic is more like alchemy—fusing two living halves into one ideal figure. The fantasy is not merely romantic; it is explicitly supernatural. The speaker imagines that "by Sorcery" she might "discover / A perfect Lover." Yet the central idea is not the wish itself but its impossibility. After the dream of fusion, the poem turns abruptly: "But she must build her Paradise above her." The perfect lover can exist only in thought, in an afterlife, or in a deferred Heaven. The speaker can find "no pleasant Love to love her," and the final line extends that emotional failure outward until "the world is void of pleasure, and death-cold." The poem argues that the split between loving and desiring cannot be repaired on earth.
Its construction reinforces that abrupt movement. The first six lines sound almost like an incantation. The rhymes—"man" with "pan," "desires" with "fires," and the closing pair "discover" and "Lover"—create a tight, sing-song confidence. The images are deliberately homely and mystical at once: a "magic pan" suggests a kitchen pot, while "holy fires" elevates it into ritual. Capitalized words such as "Sorcery," "Lover," "Paradise," and "Heaven" give the fantasy a half-ironic grandeur. Then the rhythm changes in the final four lines. The sentence becomes plain and declarative. The phrase "above her" hangs at the end of a line, as if pointing toward a realm she cannot reach. The rhyme of "old" and "death-cold" clinches the mood with a hard, bitter sound, leaving no room for the earlier charm.
What makes "Necromancy" significant is its refusal to soften that disappointment. Wickham does not blame the woman for wanting too much; instead she records the impossibility of finding both warmth and fulfillment in one person. The word "pleasant" in "no pleasant Love to love her" is especially cutting, because it reduces love to a basic comfort that the speaker still cannot have. The final image of a "death-cold" world makes the body itself feel chilled. In just ten lines, the poem turns a magical fantasy into a bleak, clear-eyed recognition. That tension—between imagined fusion and real coldness—gives it a lasting place as an early feminist lyric about the unbridgeable gap between love, desire, and the life women were permitted to lead.