Narcissus is usually a figure we look at from a safe distance, the boy who fell in love with his own image and wasted away. In Jack Spicer's poem, the speaker steps into the scene and addresses him directly, with tenderness instead of judgment. "Poor Narcissus," he says, again and again, like someone murmuring to a friend in trouble. The poem begins as pity for another person and ends as pity for the speaker himself. That slide is the whole drama of the poem, and it is easy to miss until the final line.
Look at how the speaker positions himself. "I want to stay at your edge," he says, and later, "I so tall beside you." He is standing on the bank, looking down at a flower, while Narcissus, in the poem's own transformation of the myth, has become the flower. The speaker's height is oddly pathetic rather than powerful. He towers but cannot enter, can hover but not belong. The word "edge" does a lot of work here: it is the edge of the water, but also the edge of the other person's inner life, which the speaker can observe and mourn without ever crossing into.
The imagery is delicate, almost fragile. Narcissus has a "dim fragrance," and the river has a "dim heart"; the repeated "dim" gives everything a faint, underlit quality, as if the scene were half asleep. Ripples and sleeping fish "cross your white eyes," which is a striking picture: the flower's pale petals reflect the water's moving surface, so that living things seem to pass through its gaze. Then comes the line "Songbirds and butterflies / Japanese mine," which is the strangest in the poem. It is hard to say what it means, and a careful reader should admit that. It might suggest a miniature, ornamental beauty, something like a painted screen, a world prettier and more arranged than real. Whatever it is, its abrupt oddness breaks the lyric surface the way a stray thought breaks a daydream.
Against this soft background, the frogs arrive with real comic energy: "How wide-awake the frogs are / They won't stay out of the surface." After all the sleeping and dimness, these creatures are loud, alive, and disruptive, jumping into the very mirror that Narcissus stares into. The surface is where the poem's central idea crystallizes, because it is the surface "In which your madness and my madness / Mirrors itself." Notice the grammar: two madnesses, but a singular verb, "mirrors." Strictly speaking it is a mistake, yet it enacts what the sentence says. The two obsessions collapse into one, as if the speaker's longing and Narcissus's self-regard were the same reflection.
That is why the ending lands so hard. "Poor Narcissus / My sorrow / Self of my sorrow." The speaker began by pitying someone else, and now he finds that Narcissus is his sorrow, even the "self" of it. The old story of self-love turns into a story about how we recognize ourselves in whoever we obsess over. Loving another person, the poem hints, may be just another way of staring into water.
Formally, the poem is spare and nearly songlike. There is no rhyme scheme to speak of, and the lines are short and unpunctuated, so they float rather than march. The repeated refrain, "Flower of love / Poor Narcissus," works like a lullaby chorus, and it keeps returning even as the meaning underneath it shifts. By the end the refrain has been stripped down to its core, three short lines that fold back on themselves. The form mirrors the content: the poem circles, repeats, and finally looks at itself.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a few dozen words it retells a myth, adds a second figure, builds a mood, and then turns the myth inside out. It is quiet, a little strange, and unexpectedly moving.