Genevieve Taggard’s speaker looks at a stone falling, a bird flying, an arrow finding its mark, and feels that human beings have no such clear direction. Instead, people “scatter like foam,” restless and unanchored. She longs for a song strong enough to carry her grief and let her escape into the motion of waves, leaves, and seabirds. There is a desperate wish to forget the future and simply move with the world’s currents. But the final stanza turns bleaker: humans cannot fully live because they know they will die, and cannot become what they long to be. Unlike stones, which seem to have a destiny, people feel stranded without purpose or motion. The mood is mournful and yearning, with a quiet bitterness underneath.
The Futile — Summary
The stone falls, the bird flies, the arrow goes home, But we have no motion, we scatter like foam.
O, give me a song to sing for your sorrow, A song that will lift, like a wave from the reef, You and myself, that will fling like an arrow My poor scattered words to the target of grief: I want to forget, to remember no morrow, To go with the petrel, to go with the leaf. . . .
We would fly with all things to the goal of their flying, We would turn with all things to the magnetic star, But we never can live, because of our dying, And we never can be, for the things that we are. We alone of all creatures — the stones more than we — Have no end, no motion, no destiny.