Anna Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, wrote “Service” during the early twentieth century, when women’s lives were often shaped by the expectation to serve others, and her own career as a poet sat uneasily beside marriage and domestic duty. The poem takes that expectation and intensifies it until it becomes a kind of fever. At its heart, “Service” is about a love so consuming that the speaker does not simply offer devotion; she longs to disappear into it. She cannot think to please the beloved, declares her art wasted, and burns only to ease him. The sweetness she imagines exists not in being loved back but in “dreams of utter service.” That is the poem’s central paradox: fulfilment arrives through self-emptying, and the speaker asks for no praise, no esteem, only the “hope of service” gathered in a dream.
The poem’s music is loose and incantatory. Lines often end on soft, unaccented syllables—“please you,” “ease you”—and the rhymes are irregular but insistent: “wasted” leans toward “tasted,” “praise me” returns as “raise me,” and the closing stanza settles into a clearer ABAB pattern with “Lover” / “discover” and “sky” / “I.” This movement from fevered irregularity to cleaner rhyme mirrors the speaker’s own wish: to climb out of burning confusion into “clear, cool air.” The first stanza’s short, blunt sentences—“My art is wasted” and “You are burnt with madness”—land like small shocks, while the repeated phrase “I love you so entirely” acts as a refrain that keeps pulling the mind back to one obsession. There is little fixed metre; instead, the lines move between clipped declarations and longer, breathless pleas. The second stanza stretches outward as the speaker imagines being “outcast with one thing to raise me,” its extra length enacting the reach of her desire.
Wickham sets two landscapes against each other. The opening is full of heat—“burnt with madness,” “being burns”—as though love is not warmth but a consuming fire. The final stanza pleads to escape to “the mountains” and make a “habitation near the sky.” That change is not just from sickness to health; it is from the body’s overheated interior to an elevated, almost spiritual world where the couple can discover a “plan of perfect living.” Service becomes a discipline of ascent rather than mere submission.
The word “service” itself carries religious overtones, implying worship, duty, and self-denial. When the speaker says she would be “low in all esteem” and “outcast with one thing to raise me,” she sounds less like a conventional lover than an anchorite who embraces humiliation because it sharpens devotion. Yet the poem does not entirely endorse this surrender. For a woman poet of Wickham’s time, such total self-abnegation was both a cultural ideal and a real threat to identity. The line “My art is wasted” may be the quietest and most disturbing moment: the speaker is ready to abandon her creative voice for a love that demands everything.
What makes “Service” significant is that it does not tidy up that conflict. It refuses to offer a simple romantic bargain. Instead, it gives voice to the erotic and emotional intensity of self-abnegation while leaving room for readers to feel its danger. The final invitation to the mountains may be a vision of renewal or a retreat from the world; either way, the “plan of perfect living” remains a dream, gathered not in reality but in longing. That unresolved tension is why the poem still feels alive—it dramatises how the desire to serve can both elevate and erase the self.