Lizette Woodworth Reese was an American poet and longtime Baltimore schoolteacher whose short lyrics often examine memory, faith, and the natural world. She published much of her work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when poets frequently looked back at childhood as a time of lost innocence. “The Change” belongs to that tradition but gives it a sharper edge. In twelve compact lines, Reese traces a speaker’s movement from childish forgetfulness to an adult state in which every detail of the seasons becomes impossible to ignore—and somehow sacred.
The poem sets up its central contrast immediately. The speaker recalls a time when she “forgot all, everything, / In any day of fall or spring” and even went to bed without saying “the little prayer” she should have said. That double phrase “all, everything” mimics a child’s scattered attention, as if forgetting were as natural as the changing seasons. But the word “should” introduces a quiet moral weight. The speaker is not merely nostalgic for childhood; she is measuring a distance between then and now. That distance becomes clear in the next lines: “I cannot now forget at all / Anything of spring or fall.” The child could forget everything, including prayer; the adult cannot forget anything. Memory itself has become a kind of compulsion.
What the adult remembers is not abstract. Reese builds a catalogue of small, vivid things: “the splutter of wind within a hedge,” “smell of hyssop from the edge / Of a hot field,” the field itself “dry as a bone upon a shelf,” deer that “fleet across a wood,” and “an old woman in a hood.” Each image is concrete and sensory. The word “splutter” reproduces the very noise of wind catching in leaves. The hyssop carries a biblical echo, since hyssop was used in purification rituals, and here it grows at the edge of a field, ordinary yet resonant. Comparing a dry field to a bone upon a shelf is startlingly domestic: the landscape is both alive and oddly stored away, as if memory keeps it preserved. The deer are all motion, “fleet” compressing their swiftness into a single verb. Then, in the final item, a human figure appears—an old woman in a hood—subtly reminding us that what we remember is not only beautiful nature but also aging and mortality.
The poem’s structure reinforces its argument. It moves in rhyming couplets, mostly iambic tetrameter, which gives it a nursery-rhyme regularity at first. That sing-song quality suits the childhood opening. As the images accumulate, however, the couplets feel less like a lullaby and more like an incantation. The rhymes become strongly tactile: “hedge” and “edge,” “itself” and “shelf,” “wood” and “hood.” Each pair encloses a complete observation, and the steady rhythm suggests a mind trying to order an overwhelming flood of remembered detail. The final couplet breaks from description into direct statement: “My prayers rise up, each like a spear, / So sharp that God cannot but hear.” The simile is deliberately aggressive. Prayers are not soft whispers here; they are weapons. The word “sharp” connects back to the dry-edged field and the keen awareness of loss. Adult prayer, the poem suggests, is born from an attention so intense it almost hurts.
This is what makes “The Change” significant. It does not simply say that adults remember what children ignore. It transforms memory into a form of devotion. The speaker’s inability to forget the splutter of wind or the old woman in a hood becomes the very reason her prayers can pierce. In just twelve lines, Reese offers a compressed spiritual autobiography: the child who forgot to pray becomes the adult whose whole world is too vivid to forget, and that vividness itself reaches toward God. The poem’s quiet lesson is that attention—even painful, unasked-for attention—can become prayer.