Anna Wickham’s speaker daydreams about a kind of magic: if she could melt together two different men—one she loves and one she physically desires—over holy flames, she might create the perfect partner. The fantasy is playful, almost alchemical, but it quickly darkens. She admits that any paradise must be postponed until Heaven, after she has grown old, because no warm or pleasant love will have her in this life. The world feels emptied of pleasure and cold as death.
The mood is bitter and wistful at once. There is longing in the imagined spell, but also resignation and loneliness underneath. The speaker treats romance as a failed experiment, and the poem ends with a sense of emotional isolation that no magic can fix.