The word "puberty" appears only in the title. The seven lines that follow never explain it. We get a child, a garden and a rumour about the navy, and that oblique approach is the poem's whole method. It makes a tiny text feel both strange and true to what growing up is like.
Start with the grammar. The poem is a single sentence, running down the page without a full stop until the very end, and it opens on a helpless phrase: a child "overtaken by change." To be overtaken is to be caught by something faster, like a storm or a car or an army, and the child has done nothing to bring it on. The next verb is just as passive: she "endures her sickness." The possessive is telling, because it is *her* sickness, something she must sit through alone like a fever. Calling it a sickness could be the child's own frightened view or an anxious adult's, and the poem doesn't say which. That ambiguity is part of its unease.
The garden seems at first a gentle setting, a place of buds and growth where the body's changes might be quietly echoed. But she is not enjoying it, only enduring. The comma after "garden" is followed by the shortest line in the poem, "tells me." This is the only moment the speaker appears, and he takes up just two words. He is a listener and reporter, not a comforter. He says nothing about what he feels or does, and that restraint is oddly believable, since adults often can't do much but hear what a child says.
What she tells him is the poem's swerve: "the navy may land there." A garden is no harbour, so the idea is absurd, with the logic of a fever or a dream. But the absurdity carries meaning. Landing is arrival from outside, force coming ashore, and it extends the earlier "overtaken" from private illness to occupation. The body becomes territory being taken. The cautious "may" keeps it half-serious, like a child's confident prediction or a dread of something not yet arrived. An adult reader might also hear sailors going ashore and catch a hint of sexual awakening, though the poem only suggests this and never says it.
The last clause, "for pen and ink have begun / to do business," is the strangest. "For" is an old-fashioned way of saying "because," and it promises a reason. The reason makes no sense, since why would pen and ink doing business bring in a fleet? Yet it feels like dream logic. Pen and ink are the tools of signing, contracts and ledgers, the paperwork of grown-up life, and "to do business" means exchange and bargaining. One reading is that childhood is a world without transactions, and adolescence is where a person starts being counted, valued and written about. Another is that the child herself is beginning to write, to record what is happening to her. The poem supports both, and it holds back from choosing.
Sound and shape support this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run roughly eight, five, four, two, six, seven and four syllables, so they shrink to the tiny "tells me," swell again with the navy and the pen and ink, and then drop. The sounds shift too. "Navy may land" is open and rolling, with long vowels, while "pen," "begun" and "business" are plain, clipped and administrative. The poem ends on "business," a deadpan word for something so large, and in a small way it too has landed somewhere flat and ordinary.
That ending is what makes the poem worth reading. Puberty is often described in clinical language or in sentimental language about blossoming. This poem does neither. It treats the change as something that arrives like an invasion, is mixed up with illness, and is bound up with the adult world of money and paper. In seven lines it manages to be funny, eerie and sympathetic at once, and it trusts the reader to work out the rest.