Three lines, nine syllables, not a single verb, and still Larry Eigner's poem fills a quiet room with the noise of falling water. It is about the odd way images carry more than they seem to. A picture is one of the quietest things there is, a flat surface that makes no sound. Yet these pictures are "full of / waterfall / echoes," as if sound had soaked into the paper and stayed there. The central idea seems to be that seeing and hearing are not separate. Looking at an image, or remembering one, sets off a whole sensory aftermath.
The poem's shape does much of the work. The first line ends on "of," a word that cannot stand alone and demands something to follow it. The reader is left hanging for a moment, which is how it feels to stand at the lip of a drop. Then comes "waterfall," alone on its own line, a long, heavy word with a falling rhythm: WAter-FALL. The poem is itself a narrow column dropping down the page, and the single-word line gives the waterfall room to be seen before anything is said about it.
That is where the ambiguity begins. "Waterfall echoes" can be read as one phrase, the echoes of a waterfall. The line break also lets us read "full of waterfall" first, the pictures brimming with the thing itself, and then hear "echoes" arrive afterwards as a trailing extra. The ear may even catch "the waterfall echoes" as a tiny sentence, though the grammar will not quite allow it. The poem never settles which reading is right, and that suits a poem about reverberation, where one thing keeps turning into another.
The lines also shrink. "Pictures, full of" has four syllables, "waterfall" three, "echoes" two. The poem fades as an echo does, each line a little fainter than the last. The final word reinforces this: ECH-oes puts its stress first and lets the second syllable slip away unstressed, so the poem ends by dying out. There is no full stop, which leaves the sound unclosed, as though it were still travelling after the words have stopped.
There is no rhyme in the conventional sense, but the poem is full of small internal echoes. "Full" and "waterfall" share the same f and l sounds, so the first line's ending is quietly answered by the second. The hard k sound in "Pictures" returns in "echoes," so the first and last words are bound together by the same sound. The poem begins and ends on the same consonant, which is a rather tidy way for it to echo itself.
The imagery is only two nouns, but they are well chosen. A waterfall is defined by motion and noise, and a picture is defined by stillness and silence, so the poem puts two opposites in one frame. A picture of a waterfall can only freeze the water, yet the poem insists that the sound has been kept. "Full" suggests a vessel brimming over, which is what water does. The plurals matter too. These are many pictures, perhaps a whole collection or a lifetime of remembered scenes, and echoes pile up the same way, each reverberation bouncing off the last. There is a further pun in the idea itself. A picture is a copy of something seen, and an echo is a copy of something heard, so the pictures are echoes in two senses at once.
The poem has no title, only the three asterisks. Without a title, the poem seems to begin in the middle, as if the echo had already started before we arrived, and the first words work as its title.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not describe a waterfall or tell us how to feel about one. It sets two words next to a third and trusts the reader's mind to supply the roar, the spray and the cold air. It also does what it says: the lines thin out like a fading sound, and the repeated sounds make it echo. A poem this small could easily be slight, but here the form and the idea turn out to be the same thing, and that is why the three lines stay in the ear after they are finished.