Elizabeth Madox Roberts grew up in rural Kentucky, and her 1922 collection *Under the Tree* gathers poems that look at the world from a child’s height. Roberts later became known for novels such as *The Time of Man*, but these early poems already show how seriously she took the inner life of a child. “Water Noises” belongs to that world of solitary play, where a creek is not scenery but a companion. The speaker says plainly, “When I am playing by myself, / And all the boys are lost around,” then tunes in to a different frequency and hears in the water’s movement “a little talking sound.” That phrase sets the poem’s central idea: isolation can sharpen attention until the natural world seems to address the listener directly. The water’s murmur, “And do you think? And do you think?”, becomes the voice of an inward wonder the child hears outside herself.
The poem unfolds in four quatrains whose second and fourth lines rhyme or half-rhyme—around/sound, wink/think, tree/killdee, drink/think—creating a loose, song-like current. The simple ABCB rhyme scheme gives each stanza a familiar shape, yet the half-rhymes keep it from becoming too neat, much like a creek’s irregularities. The rhythm stays close to speech, with three or four stresses in each line, so the poem feels like a child talking to herself rather than reciting a formal verse. That effect matters because the refrain behaves like a real sound heard in water. Roberts places the repeated question in quotation marks and lets it return, just as water repeats its noise over stones. The shift from “saying on” to “I still can hear” across the stanzas turns the question into a refrain that outlasts other sounds.
The images move between quick distractions and the steady voice beneath them. A bug “shoots by that snaps and ticks,” a bird rises “into the sky to sing,” and its call arrives as the wonderfully plain “Killdee, killdee!”—an onomatopoeic word made from the bird’s actual cry. A “yellow cow” comes down “to splash a while and have a drink,” a slower, heavier interruption. Yet each time, the water’s question remains. The word “wink” gives the ripple a teasing, almost human gesture, as if the creek is playing along. The phrase “saying on” suggests continuous speech rather than a single statement. That continuity matters: the child is not simply hearing water; she is practicing a way of being alone, listening past temporary noises toward something ongoing.
What makes “Water Noises” significant is its respect for a child’s solitude. Many poems about childhood observe from the outside, celebrating cuteness or innocence. Roberts works from inside the listening mind. She treats the habit of hearing words in water as a genuine form of thought, not make-believe to be dismissed. The repeated “And do you think?” is a real philosophical question—though it may also be only the sound of a creek. That ambiguity is the poem’s strength. It suggests that thinking itself can feel like an outside voice when one is alone, and that the boundary between the self and the world becomes porous beside running water. In an age of constant noise, the poem still offers a quiet model of attention: the child does not need the boys to come back, because the water keeps asking and she keeps listening.