She was silent – who would hear her pleading? Men and beasts were housed – but she must stay Houseless in the great and pitiless city, Till the dawning of the winter day. (51–58)  Procter's Catholicism also influenced her choice of images and symbols; Procter often uses references to the Virgin Mary, for example, to "introduce secular and Protestant readers to the possibility that a heavenly order critiques Victorian gender ideology's power structure." Procter wrote several poems about war (the majority of poems published on this topic in "Household Words" were by Procter), although she rarely deals directly with the topic, preferring to leave war "in the background, something to be inferred rather than stated." Generally, these poems portray conflict as something "that might unite a nation that had been divided by class distinctions." According to critic Gill Gregory, Procter "does not overtly ponder the vexed question of the poet, particularly the woman poet and her accession to fame", unlike many other women poets of the time, such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Procter is instead primarily concerned with the working classes, particularly working-class women, and with "emotions of women antagonists which have not fully found expression". Procter's work often embodies a Victorian aesthetic of sentimentality, but, according to Francis O'Gorman, does so with "peculiar strength"; Procter employs emotional affect without simplification, holding "emotional energy [in tension] ... against complications and nuances." Procter's language is simple; she expressed to a friend a "morbid terror of being misunderstood and misinterpreted", and her poetry is marked by "simplicity, directness, and clarity of expression". Procter was "fabulously popular" in the mid-19th century; she was Queen Victoria's favourite poet and Coventry Patmore stated that the demand for her work was greater than that for any other poet, excepting Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Readers valued Procter's poems for their plainness of expression, although they were considered "not so very original in thought; [their merit is that] they are indeed the utterances 'of a believing heart', pouring out its fulness." Procter herself expressed little ambition about her work: her friend Bessie Raynor Belloc thought that Procter was pained that her reputation as a poet had outstripped her father's, and quoted Procter as saying that "Papa is a poet.