ABSTRACT
Adelaide Procter’s lyric ‘The Inner Chamber’ appeared in the ‘Second Series’ of Legends and Lyrics. The speaker sits on the threshold of what appears to be an inner sanctum and the poem provides a striking and poignant image of the woman poet who is still struggling with her relationship to the authorities this ‘inner chamber’ seems to metaphorise. Procter, the singer of poems, sits on the threshold of a place which has become precious to her. The ‘door of gold’ suggests just how much she has invested in the inner sanctum. The authority inside may be God who renders her song ‘immortal’, or someone who possesses ‘magical art’. Her doubts about the inner circle and its secrets, with its interminable ‘arches’ and ‘coils of musical sound’, are, however, manifest. In this poem Procter describes the imprisoning position of a woman who is situated in an ambivalent position midway between heaven and earth.
