The title names Polyhymnia, a Muse of sacred song, but here she is a gardener moving through rows of corn. The leaves have curled and rattle dryly, looking almost like autumn, and the speaker catches the plants’ seeming wish to skip ahead and give up before forming seed. There is gentle humor in that observation, but the real mood is tender and protective. The gardener does not let the drought win: she attaches a yellow whirligig sprinkler to the hose, and it becomes an instrument singing the “holy song of water” to the leaves. Mulch is treated as a quiet gift, holding life in the soil. The poem moves from dry, brittle tension to hope: today’s care makes tomorrow’s grain possible.
Polyhymnia — Summary
walks between the beds critical of eye, noting the way the leaves of corn have curled upon themselves, rattling in hardly any breeze at all.
They'd like to make believe it's Autumn now, would they? Playing at getting past the part where seed heads form, waving their silky hair, and then depart, leaving the leaves bereft
of any purpose but to leave this world -- except, of course, they don't: that is the gift of mulch. She brings the hose and couples to its end a yellow whirligig, made to sing
the holy song of water to the leaves. Today, green fullness. Tomorrow, living grain.