A lover’s demand meets a wider horizon in Genevieve Taggard’s “Leave Me Alone a Little.” Taggard, an American poet born in 1894 and active in modernist and leftist circles until her death in 1948, published the piece in her 1922 collection *For Eager Lovers*. That context matters: the early 1920s were years of open argument about women’s autonomy, and Taggard’s speaker sounds less like a Victorian beloved than a modern woman guarding an inner life. Her plea is not for separation from love but for room to be “pouring with the sea / Out to the moon’s impersonal majesty.”
The poem stages a tug between personal attachment and impersonal awe. A partner presses close — “Must I be yours” — but the speaker’s heart is already elsewhere, drawn out to water and moonlight. The central idea is that a self can belong to someone without being wholly owned; there is a part of her that answers only to vast, nonhuman rhythms. Even the phrase “my little vow endures” is double-edged. It may echo the marriage vow, but what endures is not only the promise to another person; it is her own staying power, “surviving all, surviving even you.” That triple survival quietly shifts the meaning of fidelity away from possession and toward persistence.
Taggard’s construction is conversational but carefully pressurized. The lines move between exclamation and question, with irregular rhyme and rhythm that follow the speaker’s quick shifts from irritation to tenderness. The repetition of “Leave me alone” acts like a heartbeat or wave, returning four times but with changing weather: first as a request, then as a declaration, then as a boundary, and finally as an address to the very sea that follows her. Rhymes are scattered — “sea” and “majesty,” “rendezvous” and “dune,” “sea” and “me” — not locking the poem into a tight form but letting echoes surface naturally.
The imagery gives the poem its pull away from human scale. The moon has “impersonal majesty,” the sea is “soft, soft-spoken,” and the speaker asks the lover to “wait behind the dune,” as if human need must defer to a larger meeting. Calling the sea and moon “old” transforms them into companions older than any romance. The word “false” is key: she insists she is “not false except with my old sea and moon,” which redefines infidelity. Her deeper loyalty is not to another person but to an experience of boundlessness. That may be threatening to a lover, yet the poem makes it sound beautiful rather than cruel. The final line — “Why will you follow me!” — hovers between wonder and complaint, leaving unclear whether she scolds the sea or the person who, like the tide, cannot stop pursuing.
What makes the poem significant is how lightly it carries a serious claim. It does not reject love; it rejects love’s greed. In just a few lines, Taggard gives voice to the need for solitude inside intimacy, especially for a woman who is expected to be wholly available. The sea and moon become allies of a self that will not be entirely possessed. The speaker asks for only “a little” space, but the immensity behind that request suggests something larger: a life with room for both a lover behind the dune and an old, impersonal sea.