Sara Teasdale’s “Water Lilies” makes a strange, unsettling proposition: there are places, and feelings, so beautiful that remembering them can make return impossible. The poem speaks to a “you” who is told that if the water lilies have been forgotten—floating “on a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,” carrying their “wet, sleepy fragrance”—then it is safe to go back. But if the memory remains, the only safe response is to “turn away forever” toward the plains and prairies. The central idea is not nostalgia but its danger: memory of intense beauty can become a kind of wound, and forgetting becomes a mercy.
The poem is shaped as two balanced quatrains, almost like two paths. The first begins with an assumption: forgetfulness. The second begins with its opposite, “But if you remember,” and the abrupt turn arrives exactly halfway. The rhymes reinforce this division: “shade” closes against “afraid” in the first stanza, while “apart” and “heart” close the second. Yet the other line endings remain unrhymed, which keeps the poem from feeling rigid; the lines seem to drift a little, like the lilies themselves. The rhythm is quiet and conversational, with long lines that slow the reader down, especially in phrases such as “among mountains in the afternoon shade” and “at dusk on closing water lilies.” The imperative “turn away forever” lands with greater force because the surrounding language is so hushed.
The imagery works by fusing landscape and emotion. Water lilies are delicate, pale, rooted in dark water; here they carry a “wet, sleepy fragrance,” a phrase that blends touch, smell, and drowsiness. They exist in shadow: afternoon shade, dusk, the shadow of mountains. The poem treats shadow not as mere scenery but as something that can “fall on your heart.” That final line is the poem’s most direct gesture: the external world is made internal. If mountains cast their shadow on the heart, then the heart is a landscape too, with its own dark lakes and places where lilies close.
The words “forgotten” and “remember” do most of the poem’s argument. The repeated “If you have forgotten” in the first stanza makes forgetting sound fragile and temporary, while “remember” in the second stanza is treated as permanent and dangerous. The contrast between places is also a contrast between emotional states. The plains and prairies, “where pools are far apart,” are dry, open, and perhaps emptier. But that emptiness is offered as protection. There, the speaker says, “you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies.” The word “not” promises absence as a blessing. The water lilies close at dusk, and that closing can be read as an ending: the end of a day, the end of a feeling, the small death that beauty performs every evening. To watch it is to be caught in the memory of something passing.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to sentimentalize memory. Many poems treat remembering as sacred or healing; “Water Lilies” treats remembering as a threat from which one may need to flee. The second-person voice implicates the reader, making the choice immediate. The poem does not explain what the water lilies stand for—a lost love, a lost time, a place of happiness—but their danger lies precisely in that openness. They are beautiful enough that forgetting them is difficult, and remembering them is not safety but the shadow falling again. The poem’s power is that it makes an argument about the heart through eight lines of landscape, and leaves the reader in the dry, safe, lonely plains with the warning still echoing.