Two voices answer each other across a gap that widens with every line. In «Song for September», Jack Spicer sets a speaker, labeled simply "I", against a chorus of children, and the whole poem is the slow pulling-apart of the two. The children stay where they are, singing. The speaker walks away, and the poem ends with the children's flat, unanswerable verdict: "And you will never return."
The situation is a kind of ritual dialogue, closer to a ballad or a folk catechism than to a conversation. The children ask, the speaker answers, and the questions keep circling one fact: he has left, and something in him has died. "When will our hearts come back from your holiday?" they ask at the start, and already the word "holiday" does double work. It sounds light, like a summer break, but it is the seam through which loss enters, since a holiday is exactly the thing that ends, and September is when it does. The children keep calling it "the death of your summer." Nothing in the text tells us what the speaker has literally lost; what the poem gives us is the feeling of an adult who senses that the season of wholeness is over and that he is the one who walked out of it.
The refrain, "A little river / And a colored fountain," is the poem's most striking device. It is indented, repeated, and never explained, and its simplicity is the point. It sounds like the scrap of a nursery song, and it works as a piece of childhood that stays fixed while everything else moves. Notice how the speaker's answers gradually lean on it. When the children ask how he will find "the highway of poets," he replies, "The fountain and a river and an old song." The refrain has been promoted from background music to a map. The old song is both what he is fleeing and the only thing that might guide him back.
The imagery is a strange mixture of sweetness and grim physical fact. The speaker holds "a bloody rose and a white lily," blood and purity in one hand, and the children tell him to dip them "in the water of an old song," as if song could wash or baptize them. Then comes the most unsettling line: he tastes "the flavor of the bones of my big skull." The adjective "big" is wonderfully awkward, a child's word applied to a grown man's death-head. Even at his bleakest, the speaker's vocabulary keeps sliding back toward the nursery. The "magical clockworkman" he seeks belongs to the same toy-box logic, a figure from a story who might wind time backward.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme to hold it together. What organizes it instead is repetition and call-and-response, and the rhythm is incantatory rather than metrical. The children's speeches grow shorter and more insistent, while the speaker's final answer breaks the pattern by running long: "farther than my poems, farther than the mountains, farther than the birds." The piling-up of "farther" is a kind of reaching, and notice what the list climbs past, namely his own poems first. Early on he says the children's hearts will return "when my words no longer need me," a curious phrase suggesting that language has taken on a life that both serves and consumes him. To go farther than his poems is to go beyond the very thing he makes.
The last request is the poem's emotional core. He wants to ask Christ "to give me back my childhood, ripe with sunburn and feathers and a wooden sword." The details are tactile and specific, a body remembered rather than an idea of innocence. Yet the children, the real keepers of that childhood, refuse him. Their answer sounds less like cruelty than like knowledge: you cannot petition your way back into a place you have already left.
That is what gives the poem its quiet power. It does not argue that childhood is precious; it stages the moment of finding out that longing is not a vehicle. The song stays where it was, and the one who needs it keeps walking.