Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941) grew up in rural Kentucky, and before she became known for novels such as *The Time of Man*, she wrote poems that looked closely at the landscape of her childhood. “At the Water” comes from *Under the Tree* (1922), a collection of short poems spoken in a child’s voice. The setting is a “branch,” the regional Kentucky word for a small stream, and the speaker is young enough to call whatever moves in the shallows “wiggletails.” From the opening lines, the poem places itself in a particular place, not a generic outdoors.
The poem is not a description of a landscape so much as a record of how a child inhabits one. The speaker announces what she liked—going to the branch, playing with the wiggletails—then turns away from sight and into the nose. Five small smells and one big one are “going round in the air,” as if the air were full of lively, almost playable things. The list that follows maps the stream from water to mud to moss to fennel on the bank. The sixth smell, the one she “couldn't tell,” matters because it prevents the catalog from becoming a tidy exercise. Even while counting and sorting, the child leaves room for mystery.
The central idea is that attention is a kind of affection. The child does not merely notice the stream; she sorts its smells into a small society of five minor notes and one major one. The “little cold smell” of water, the mud that “was more,” the “cool wet moss,” and the fennel are all distinct, but they do not clash. The one big smell from the mint seems to dominate the group, yet the final line treats the whole mixture as pleasant company: they “all went together very well.” There is no hierarchy that hurts; the big smell and the small smells need one another to make the place complete.
Roberts builds this small world through a loose, chant-like form. The poem has three quatrains with offhand rhyming pairs—“there/air,” “more/shore,” “tell/well”—and a rhythm that sounds like a child’s private counting game. The repetition of “And one was…” turns the second stanza into a litany. Words like “wiggletails” and “branch” root the poem in Kentucky speech, while “fennel” and “mint” give the air a sharp, almost kitchen-garden specificity. The adjectives are not merely visual: water is “cold,” moss is “cool” and “wet,” the mud is “more.” Smell becomes a way of feeling texture and distance, not just fragrance. The mint’s big presence is achieved partly by rhythm; after the longer phrases that list the other smells, the word “mint” arrives as a clean, sudden stress, as if the plant had stepped closer.
The poem is significant because it takes a child’s sensory experience seriously. Instead of teaching a lesson or pointing to a moral, it preserves a moment of pure, organizing pleasure. The speaker does not need to identify every scent to enjoy the arrangement; the unknown one belongs just as much as the others. That quiet acceptance of partial knowledge gives the poem its staying power. In a few plain lines, Roberts makes the air around a Kentucky branch feel like a small, balanced ecosystem, known through the nose rather than seen from a distance. The result is not a simplified nature poem for children, but a precise model of how the world can be loved before it is fully understood.