A Wife in London Literary Elements

a tragic anti-war poem

The poem is set in London in December of 1899, during the Boer War.

The poem is narrated by a covert third-person speaker, portraying the perspective of the wife in London.

The mood is bleak and dark, supported by the constantly present fog in the poem. The tone of the poem in the first stanza is menacing, a danger and heartbreak looming nearby.

In the second stanza, the poem takes a tragic turn, when the wife learns of her husband's demise only to receive a hopeful letter from him, written before his death.

The protagonist is the wife in London who is waiting for news from her husband. The antagonist would be the war that he died in.

The major conflict in the poem is the war that took the husband from his wife's side and killed him before the two could have the happy life together they had planned.

The climax of the poem happens in the second stanza's last line. The wife has received a letter, bearing the news of her husband's death.

The glooming, menacing tone in the first stanza foreshadows that something unpleasant is about to happen. The dark mist surrounding the wife is broken through by the cold, mechanical street-lamp, just as her hope for her husband's return is about to be destroyed by the short, brief letter informing her of his death.

In line 10, the letter informs the wife that her husband has fallen. This is in understated way to describe the fact that he has died.

While the poem never explicitly names the war that her husband is fighting in, the exact timing of the poem (December 1899) as well as the mentioning of a far South Land allude to the fact that he died in the Boer War.

There are two main images in the poem. In the first part, there is the imagery of the street-lamp that coldly breaks through the protective mist, revealing the truth about her husband's death to the wife.
In the second part, there is the image of the husband writing this letter to his wife, full of hope about the future together, only to put down the pen and be killed shortly thereafter.

The main paradox in the poem is the fact that the wife receives a letter from her husband after she has already learned of his death.

l. 17-20: "of his hoped return,
and of home-planned jaunts [...]
and of new love."

This parallelism further strengthens the tragic irony of his letter, by painfully spelling out everything that the couple will not be able to do.

Synecdoche: l. 16. highest feather: the highest feather is a synecdoche referring to the quill he uses to write in

There are no instances of personification in the poem.