Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948), an American poet who later became known for her radical politics and editorial work, first published “The Futile” in her 1922 collection *For Eager Lovers*. The poem emerged in a decade shadowed by the First World War’s aftermath, when many writers were questioning inherited certainties and testing how much metaphysical weight a short lyric could bear. Taggard turns inward here, to a private crisis: the feeling that human beings alone cannot move with the clean purpose of the natural world.
The opening couplet establishes the contrast through three quick, decisive images: “The stone falls, the bird flies, the arrow goes home.” Each subject possesses an arc—gravity, instinct, intention. Against that certainty the speaker places “we”: “But we have no motion, we scatter like foam.” The word “scatter” is crucial because it suggests not movement but dispersal, a breaking apart without destination. The rest of the poem is driven by the wish to overcome that foam-like shapelessness. The speaker asks for a song that will “lift, like a wave from the reef” and “fling like an arrow / My poor scattered words to the target of grief.” Language itself becomes the arrow: it wants to travel, to strike, to arrive. Yet the longing is also an escape from time and memory—“to remember no morrow, / To go with the petrel, to go with the leaf.” The petrel and the leaf belong to wind and season; they do not deliberate about where they are going.
The poem’s form enacts this tension between order and dispersal. After the opening couplet, the two six-line stanzas use alternating rhyme in the first—“sorrow,” “reef,” “arrow,” “grief,” “morrow,” “leaf”—so that the ear is pulled forward and back like a wave. The rhythm is mostly iambic but quickened by extra unstressed syllables, producing a rocking, almost incantatory motion. Then the last stanza changes key. The repeated “We would” gives way to the harder grammar of refusal: “But we never can live, because of our dying, / And we never can be, for the things that we are.” The rhyme of “flying” and “dying” makes flight and death into a single locked sound. The final couplet closes with “we” and “destiny,” a near rhyme that leaves the poem just short of resolution—fitting for a speaker who claims that humans have no destiny.
That final claim is the poem’s sharpest turn. “We alone of all creatures—the stones more than we— / Have no end, no motion, no destiny.” The phrase “the stones more than we” is deliberately compressed, as if even inanimate stone outranks human beings in belonging to an order. A stone can fall; a bird can fly; an arrow can go home. Humans, burdened with consciousness of death and self, cannot simply be. Taggard’s word “futile” points not to ordinary failure but to a philosophical condition: the very awareness that gives us longing also keeps us from fulfilling it.
What makes the poem significant is its reversal of the Romantic nature lyric. In many earlier poems, the speaker turns to a bird or a wave for comfort or continuity. Taggard turns to them and finds only evidence of what humans lack. Yet the poem does not collapse into silence; it keeps moving, keeps rhyming, keeps asking for a song. That is the quiet drama of “The Futile”—a voice that calls human purpose impossible while proving, in its own crafted motion, how powerful the longing for purpose can be.