Genevieve Taggard’s “Talking Water” opens not with a human observer but with a pool addressing a shy creature—part deer, part faun of legend—in tones of urgent reassurance. Taggard, an American poet active from the 1920s through the 1940s, is often associated with the politically engaged literary left, yet her lyric instinct could turn a landscape into a speaking presence. Written between the wars, when many poets were testing how far inward a lyric voice could go, this poem makes nature itself the desiring consciousness rather than the observed backdrop.
The pool’s invitation is full of protective promises. It asks the “Beautiful” visitor to “poise your forefoot” in its water and insists nothing will startle it: no leaf will lift, no shade shake, no “plunging” intruder will come. The central tension is that the speaker wants both to calm the creature and to be touched by it. Noon is the enemy, a blazing maze, while the pool offers coolness, stillness, and an almost maternal refuge. “Kneel near this drop of water on stone” shrinks the whole lake to a tiny altar, and the command gives the meeting a ritual hush. Yet the repeated imperatives — “Thrust in your feet! / Trample this silver, trample this sand” — reveal a buried eagerness. The water will not claim even the fawn’s shadow for its “naked ache,” but it cannot stop asking the creature to enter, mingle, float. The poem is a courtship where restraint is the only safe seduction.
Sound and structure carry that mixture of stillness and longing. The lines ride an iambic current, mostly five-beat but often slackening into four, with couplets that sometimes rhyme cleanly — “shake” and “lake,” “stone” and “alone” — and sometimes slip into slant echoes like “blue” and “too.” The frequent pauses after “See!” and “There,” make the voice sound as if it is catching itself, trying not to frighten. Sibilant and liquid sounds pool in words such as “poise,” “loose,” “ripple,” “silver,” and “lessening,” so the poem’s texture feels wet and glassy. The word “Beautiful” hangs at the end of two lines, less a name than a reverent exhale.
The imagery deepens the poem’s central idea of reflection and double selves. When the water imagines the fawn leaning over it, it promises “another faun, like you, but green” with flicking ears and curving throat, a shadow hoof among the “pebble-splotches.” This green double is both a gift and a rival, an image the pool can produce but cannot keep. The water confesses it listens for hoofs and asks, “Am I timid, too?” — a line that dissolves the distance between speaker and addressee. Both are wary creatures in a harsh forest, and the noon heat makes them allies.
What makes “Talking Water” significant is this reversal of nature poetry’s usual gaze. Rather than a human speaker watching a wild animal, a wild place speaks, longs, and practices self-control. The final couplet — “If you come down some blown noon to my pool, / I will be quiet, I will be cool” — closes the poem like a promise kept in advance, with “pool” and “cool” completing the circle that began with the first line’s “pool.” Taggard turns the landscape into a consciousness that knows desire can only be offered, never forced, and the poem becomes a small parable about the patience required to draw anything beautiful near.