A willow dips a branch into a pond, and the speaker asks a question the poem never answers: what is it writing? From that small image Mary F. C. Pratt builds a meditation on meaning and impermanence. The tree's "writing" is only movement, a tip touching the surface, a drip falling from a branch, rings spreading outward, and every mark disappears as it is made. By the fourth stanza the speaker concedes that "Comprehension, wisdom, nothing will come after / the fleeting words are written." The refrain "Does it matter?" hangs over it all. If a message cannot be kept or read, is it still a message?
The form is a villanelle: nineteen lines, five tercets and a closing quatrain, with two refrains that return in turn and finally meet in the last two lines. Repetition suits the subject, because the poem behaves like the pond. The same words keep coming back, slightly disturbed each time. Look at who breaks the "flat white surface." In the first stanza it is the willow's tip. In the third, the otter breaks it, and the verb shifts from "breaking" to "breaks." In the fifth, it is the "drip" from the branch. Different agents, same broken surface, and so "Does it matter?" changes meaning each time. It reads first as idle curiosity, then as a shrug at accident, then as something close to despair.
Sound does much of the work. The A-rhymes (water, matter, daughter, otter, scatter, chatter) all end on unstressed syllables, a soft falling cadence that lets each line trail away like a ripple. "After" joins them as a looser echo. The B-rhymes are brief and physical: tip, sip, slips, drip, lips, with "keep" a slightly looser fit. They name small acts of touching and falling, while the A-rhymes carry the larger, vaguer ideas. The word "matter" is the cleverest of these. It means "be important," but it is also the stuff the poem is full of: water, bark, fur, leaf. The world is thick with matter, and the speaker still wonders whether any of it matters.
The imagery is spare and nearly colourless: yellow leaves, a white surface, brown otter, brown bank. "Sleek brown otter" and "slick brown bank" are almost mirror images of each other, which fits a pond that is itself called a "mirror." Sibilance makes the otter's movement audible: "slides from the slick brown bank, and slips." The willow, "rain's own daughter," has roots that "stretch and search and sip," three verbs that make the tree seem patient and searching. It drinks water and writes on water, giving back the same element it takes in.
The final quatrain turns the mirror on the speaker. "Who am I to wonder, with my endless chatter, / words unconsidered slipping endless from my lips?" The *w* sounds that run through the poem (willow, writing, water, wind, white) now take in "wonder" and "words," so the human voice joins the natural chain. Her words "slip" like the otter, and "endless" appears twice, as if the speaker's talk, like the refrains, cannot stop. The poem seems to know it is itself a kind of chatter. Whether that makes human words as fleeting as ripples, or only less patient than the tree's, is left open, and I read the openness as deliberate.
The poem is significant because its form and its question work together. A villanelle usually suggests obsession, a mind going round the same thought. Here the circling enacts a failure to settle, and the last line is still a question, not an answer. Readers are left watching the water close over the willow's words, and over their own.