Some poems tell you what to feel; this one simply points at a girl in a plowed field and lets you catch her delight. The speaker is out for a Sunday walk when he comes across her, soaking the dirt with a hose and stomping the clods flat in torn tennis shoes. Nothing much happens. Then she aims the water at her feet, streams burst from the holes in her shoes, and she laughs, "I've got spouts in my shoes!" The poem's whole point lives in that moment: what looks like damage can be turned into wonder by someone willing to play.
The central idea is a quiet one about perspective. Torn shoes are ordinarily a small sign of wear, even of poverty. The girl treats the holes as a feature rather than a flaw, a way of becoming a fountain. The poem never argues this; it only shows her "smiling like a child" and lets the reader do the thinking. Judging by the speaker's tone, he is less a commentator than a grateful witness, and that restraint is what keeps the poem from turning sentimental.
The construction is plain on purpose. There is no rhyme and no regular meter; the lines are free verse, and their lengths shift with the sense. The opening line is long and unhurried, matching the pace of a man ambling down the street, and the second line stretches even further to fit the "singing of meadowlarks in the weed fields." That line has a pleasant loose music of its own, with the soft repeated *s* and *ng* sounds of "singing" and "meadowlarks" carrying a morning mood before the girl even appears. By contrast, the poem's last line is short and sudden, a direct quotation that ends everything on her voice rather than his. After all the description, the girl gets the final word, and it is a joyful one.
The imagery works by contrast and texture. The setting is humble: "Emerald Street," weed fields, a patch of "fresh-plowed ground." Yet the street's name hints at something richer than the scene seems to offer, and the mud is called "rich brown," a phrase that treats dirt as something to be admired. The verbs matter too. She is "trodding up and down" and "mash[ing] the clods," which are heavy, physical, earthy actions. Then the water enters, and the language lightens: streams "gush merrily," she "sang out in rare delight." The poem moves from the weight of soil to the brightness of water, and the girl is the point where the two meet. The title's image of fountains, usually something grand and decorative in a park or a palace courtyard, lands here in a muddy lot, and the mismatch is what makes it charming.
Notice also how much the poem leaves out. We never learn who the girl is, why she is watering the field, or what the speaker does next. Even the "child" simile is only a simile; we are not told her age. This gap keeps the focus on a single gesture, and it invites the reader to fill in the rest. Is she poor? Is she simply carefree? The poem declines to say, which is part of its generosity. It trusts the image.
What makes the poem worth reading is exactly this smallness. It catches an ordinary, unrepeatable instant of unselfconscious joy, the kind most of us walk past without noticing, and it honors it with just enough attention. The speaker's one real act is to stop and look. In that sense the poem is not only about the girl but about the habit of seeing: a Sunday morning, a hose, and a pair of ruined shoes are enough, if you are paying attention, to make a fountain.