Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "Marsh Lilies" begins as a modest piece of nature-watching and ends as something close to a confession of longing. Its speaker walks down to a marsh at dusk, counts the lilies, and admires them. Then his attention narrows to a single blossom he cannot pick. The poem's central idea is that the most valuable things are often the ones we are unable to possess, and that the reaching itself, the trembling hand over dark water, may matter as much as the grasping.
The opening lines are carefully humble. "There are a thousand lilies in a pond," the speaker says, then admits there may be more beyond the marsh's edges, under cypress trees where herons sleep. But he checks himself: "I can only speak of what I know." That line works as a small statement of poetic method. He will not claim the whole landscape, only the part he has actually stood in. The humility makes the later turn more affecting, because we trust a speaker who knows his limits, and then we watch him run into one.
The imagery of the first stanza is quietly lavish. The lilies "open wide / Showing the yellows of their hearts inside," a phrase that gives the flowers an openness almost like trust. Then comes the surprising comparison: "acres of loveliness / As though a snow had fallen in this land / Of scorching sun and cypresses and sand." Snow is the last thing one expects in a hot, sandy marsh, which is exactly why it works. The white blooms seem to be a gentle impossibility laid over a harsh place, cool where everything else burns. The rhythm of that last line, with its three-part list of sun, cypresses and sand, piles up the heat and dryness just so the snow can interrupt it.
The second stanza pivots on the word "But." Among all those lilies, one resists him. The verbs carry the drama: "I reach for it and it is trembling so / Upon the waters I almost pull away, / Then reach again." The trembling is ambiguous, and that is part of its power. Is the flower quivering on the water, or is the speaker's own hand shaking? The poem lets the two blur together. His retreat and second attempt, all within a single line, capture the hesitation of wanting something and fearing to disturb it. The flower is "brighter than any lily I know," and then it "glitters bright as day" while seeming "to blink, elusive as a thing in dreams." The blink is a lovely, slightly eerie touch, turning the blossom into something almost watchful, and the dream comparison explains why it cannot be held: the closer he gets, the more it dissolves.
Formally, the poem is built from rhyming couplets (pond/beyond, know/go, wide/inside), and the rhymes give it a calm, steady, almost conversational flow, like someone talking quietly at the water's edge. The lines run in a loose, comfortable iambic pattern, and the speaker often spills a thought over the line break instead of ending neatly, which keeps the voice natural. The couplets also mimic the poem's emotional shape: pairs of lines that reach toward each other and click shut, much as the speaker reaches and almost closes his hand.
The final couplet is where the poem opens into something larger. "Perhaps some night, but not a night too soon, / I'll bring back home that blossom of the moon." The phrase "blossom of the moon" fuses the white, glowing lily with the night sky, so that the flower becomes a lunar thing, as unreachable as the moon itself. Notice also "not a night too soon." The speaker is not desperate to win. He seems to want to keep the wanting alive, as though possessing the flower would end something precious.
What makes the poem worth reading is that restraint. It never states its meaning outright; it lets a flower on the water stand for any ideal, beauty or dream that glimmers just past our fingertips. Judging by its quiet tone and gentle ending, the poem treats unfulfilled longing less as a failure than as a kind of richness, one that sends the speaker back down to the marsh again.