Genevieve Taggard published “Tired Girl” in her 1922 collection *For Eager Lovers*, at a moment when American poetry was full of movement, urban noise, and brittle postwar energy. Born in 1894, Taggard came of age with modernism and later moved through bohemian and radical circles; her poems often joined lyric emotion to social awareness of women’s inner lives. “Tired Girl” turns quietly aside from public noise. In nine lines, a speaker—perhaps the girl herself, perhaps a protective companion—asks Mother Earth to hide an exhausted young woman between two hills, away from the sea and the sun. The request sounds less like a wish for death than for a necessary disappearance, a period of incubation before speech can return.
The central pressure is exhaustion: “She has so much to think of—must she run / On your bright bosom always, Mother Earth?” The question imagines the earth as both a beloved body and a surface that never stops demanding her energy. The “bright bosom” suggests sunlight, exposure, and maybe the too-vivid presence of a lover or a world that will not let her alone. The speaker does not ask for permanent escape. Instead, “some other birth” is meant to bring the tired girl back, so that after she “ponders under silent hills” she will have words for her beloved one. The real problem is not that she has nothing to say, but that she has been too busy running to think. Silence and burial become conditions of speech, and the poem treats rest as a creative necessity rather than a failure.
Form matches this rhythm of withdrawal and return. The nine lines do not follow a strict sonnet pattern, but they feel like a compressed lyric addressed to the earth. “Put her away” appears twice, turning the phrase into a gentle command, while “Mother Earth” anchors the middle and near the end. Rhymes loop back rather than advance: “hills” returns after several lines, “sun” reappears, and “Earth” chimes with “birth.” That circular structure makes the poem feel like a cycle—going underground, then coming back—rather than a single descent. The meter is mostly iambic pentameter, but the second and sixth lines shorten, “Away from the sea and the sun,” giving the petition a breathlike pause. The repeated line also changes when it returns: “the sound of the sea, and the sun” inserts sound, so the outside world becomes not just a place but a clamor threatening her ability to think.
Imagery divides the poem into two kinds of earth. Above ground there is sea and sun, bright and relentless. Underground, beneath a “swarming bosom,” there is silence and density. The word “swarming” is deliberately strange—not peaceful, but full of urgent life, as if the earth’s interior were a busy womb. The hills themselves are soft and enclosing, a place between one state and another. Taggard does not make rest sentimental; she makes it active, biological, almost maternal. The “tired girl” must be put away not because she is broken but because gestation requires darkness. The final word, “beloved one,” keeps the poem open: the girl may be speaking to a lover, to the earth, or to the part of herself that sent her away.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat female withdrawal as failure. In an era when the “new woman” was expected to be bright, available, and energetic, Taggard grants a tired girl permission to vanish for a while. The beloved one will not lose her forever; the sea and sun will receive her again, but only after the earth has done its quiet work. That small, radical claim still resonates: rest is not the opposite of love or art, and silence is not the end of words.