A fountain is an odd thing to build a poem around, and Viereck makes it odd on purpose. His speaker has constructed a kind of artificial peace, a garden of "glass symphonies" that plays "forgetfully," and the whole poem is the story of that forgetting being broken. The central idea is simple and painful: you can drown out an old love with pleasant noise, but you cannot make it stop existing. When it finally answers back, the pleasant noise falls apart.
The poem's first stanza sets up the speaker's strategy. The fountains play music "to arm my peace," a telling verb, since peace here is something defended, not simply enjoyed. The new tunes "efface" and "replace" an older peace, "my other days, / Of you the day." That last phrase is compressed almost to the point of riddle: the past is reduced to a single beloved "you," the one day that outshone all others. Notice how the lines are tiny, mostly two or three stresses long, so that the stanza itself sounds like water falling in short, bright bursts. Rhyme and near-rhyme keep chiming ("peace," "efface," "replace") and the sounds feel soothing, which is exactly the point. The form is a fountain too.
Then the mountains speak. A shout comes "Resounding out / Of mountains": "I am the same." Here Viereck builds his central contrast. The fountain is man-made, glass, tame, recycled water performing prettiness. The mountain is vast, natural, and unmoving, and what it sends back is not a song but an echo of a person's fidelity. The poem never says outright that the mountain voice is the absent lover, but the logic invites us to hear it that way: the speaker's question, "Who is that singing / Through my song?", is answered when memory "Returns at last" and the beloved's words arrive: "I waited long; / I never changed." The adverbs that open the stanzas, "Forgetfully," "Rebelliously," "Reluctantly," "Implacably," track a whole emotional progression, from evasion through resistance and grudging admission to an unstoppable return. Each one describes not only the speaker's state but the way the past behaves.
Some of the most interesting writing comes in the middle, where the poem names what fountains lack. Memory comes back "Wild with a lilt / Fountains lack / (They never burn)." That parenthesis is a small, sharp insult to the speaker's own project. Fountains are beautiful and cold; love burns. The jump between "Memory" and "Monody" is also worth savoring: a monody is a solo lament, so the word quietly rewrites the earlier "symphonies" as something thin and many-voiced but empty, replaced by a single mourning voice that actually means something.
The ending is the cruelest part. The echo returns, "Implacably," with the beloved's "unestranged / Unrest," a lovely, strange phrase suggesting that the other person's restlessness has stayed intimate, never drifted away. Then the glass arms of the fountain "Grope, grope and miss," a repetition that mimes the clumsiness of reaching for something that was never within reach. The fountains are "Rippling with doubt," "Splashed by a shout," and finally "futile," unable to sing. The earlier confidence of the music collapses into a single flat verb: "Cannot sing."
What makes the poem memorable is how much feeling it carries with so little. Its sounds are delicate and its images fragile, yet the argument is hard: consolation built on forgetting is brittle. The poem refuses to tell us whether the reunion it hints at is real or only remembered. It leaves us instead with a speaker undone by an echo, and with the unsettling idea that what we try hardest to silence may be the only thing still singing in us.