Polyhymnia, traditionally the muse of sacred song and hymns, enters this garden not with a lyre but with a hose. The substitution sets the key: ordinary tending becomes a form of praise, and close attention is the first act of devotion. The opening figure walks “between the beds / critical of eye,” noting precisely how the corn leaves “have curled upon themselves,” rattling “in hardly any breeze at all.” Already the poem treats observation as a discipline. The leaves look brittle and prematurely autumnal, and the speaker responds with wry tenderness: “They’d like to make believe it’s Autumn now, / would they?” The corn is personified as a child trying to skip the difficult middle of its season—seed head, silk, grain—before the work of ripening is done.
The poem’s fourteen-line shape is sonnet-like rather than strict: unrhymed, with a loose five-beat line that keeps breaking across line endings. Enjambment links “the leaves / of corn,” “the part / where seed heads form,” and “the gift / of mulch,” so that each phrase reaches forward in the way the garden reaches forward. The one decisive turn comes mid-line after the dash: “except, of course, they don’t: that is the gift / of mulch.” If the leaves are “bereft / of any purpose but to leave this world,” the poem corrects itself: they do not merely leave; they stay on as nourishment. Decay becomes compost, not disappearance. “Gift” is the key word here, quietly moving the poem from scarcity to generosity.
Then the figure brings the hose and “couples to / its end a yellow whirligig, made to sing / the holy song of water to the leaves.” The verb “couples” is deliberately strange—we expect her to join the hose to a tap; instead she attaches a plastic sprinkler, yellow and toy-like. That playful word “whirligig” sits beside “holy song” without apology. The poem insists that the sacred is not remote from the practical. Water itself is the hymn, and the sprinkler is its instrument. The earlier dryness—curled, rattling leaves—is answered by spray, and the final line gives the outcome: “Today, green fullness. Tomorrow, living grain.” The sentence fragments land like a proverb: the present green is not self-indulgence; it is the promise of future food.
The sound texture sharpens the contrast. In the opening, the hard consonants of “corn have curled” and “rattling” mimic thirst and stiffness. As the poem turns toward water and mulch, softer sounds take over: “silky hair,” “leaves bereft,” “holy song of water to the leaves.” The word “leaves” recurs as both noun and verb, and the poem lets that double sense work. To be a leaf is also to be something that can leave; yet in the garden, what leaves does not vanish. It becomes mulch, then soil, then next year’s green. That is the true significance of the poem: it treats the gardener’s daily work—watching for stress, watering, letting dead matter remain—as a sacred art. Polyhymnia is not an elevated visitor but a caretaker with muddy hands, and the poem itself is the hymn she sings.