Lizette Woodworth Reese, born in 1856 in Waverly, Maryland, spent much of her life teaching English in Baltimore’s public schools while writing poetry in traditional forms. “Prescience,” collected in her 1909 volume *A Wayside Lute*, arrives near the close of a long Victorian lyric tradition, yet its sharp consciousness of time already feels like modern anxiety. Reese was admired for the emotional directness and musical compression she brought to the sonnet, and this poem shows both gifts at full strength.
The poem opens not with the speaker’s own feeling but with a panoramic view of old age: old women remember rooftops warm in an “ancient sun,” old men remember wars and finished journeys, and both remember first love and “fair, dispersed springs.” That long backward gaze gives the first eight lines an elegiac weight. Yet the speaker quickly judges such an ending inadequate. Hearing “the dark, slow waters lap about” and watching “the last of candle spluttering out” is “too poor an ending to befall.” The turn at “But ours this golden earth from sky to sky” moves from age into the present tense of love, where April is “memorable” and the lovers’ thoughts reach toward each other. The central insight arrives with the speaker’s sudden foreknowledge—the sense that beneath the spring setting time is already running out. “Sudden I feel the fleet years tumbling by; / Age stares at me behind each rosy tree!” The final line, “Oh, snatch me to your heart! I would forget,” answers that dread with a demand for love strong enough to blot out the vision.
Reese builds this pressure within a sonnet structure. The first eight lines form two envelope quatrains rhyming ABBA CDDC, while the final six rhyme EFG EFG. The rhymes in the octave bind memory to loss: “things” folds into “springs,” “sun” into “done,” and “all” into “befall.” The iambic pentameter often cracks at dashes and exclamation marks, especially in the closing lines, so the poem’s smooth lyric surface breaks apart under the speaker’s fear. That breaking rhythm enacts the recognition the title promises.
The imagery sharpens the contrast between what was and what is. Old roofs, ancient sun, wars, and dispersed springs all belong to recollection and distance. The dark, slow waters and spluttering candle make death feel physical and undignified, not grand. Against these, Reese sets the “golden earth from sky to sky” and the “rosy tree,” both expansive and alive. But the rosiness is precisely where Age hides. The personification of “fleet years tumbling by” turns time into a landslide, and the word “snatch” makes love an act of rescue rather than a sentimental gesture.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to keep young love and mortality separate. Many lyrics praise April, but Reese lets the beloved landscape turn menacing because the speaker knows what April becomes. “Prescience” makes the reader feel that knowledge as a sudden blow, then offers not consolation but intensity. The wish to forget is impossible, yet the embrace is real; that paradox gives this small sonnet its lasting sting.