Anyone who has stood at the edge of a marsh on a breezy day knows the sight Rolfe Humphries begins with: a whole field of reeds leaning over in one long ripple, so that the wind seems to flow across the land like a river. "Little Fugue" takes that single image and pushes it until it becomes a way of thinking about time and the human mind. The central idea is that our inner lives behave like the reeds. We bend under the pressure of passing time, we spring back, and we are never entirely still. The poem makes its claim through sound and repetition as much as through statement, which is why it rewards being read aloud.
The title is a clue to how the whole thing works. A fugue, in music, is built from a short theme that is stated, then picked up and layered again and again, with the same material returning in new arrangements. Humphries writes the poem that way. The same handful of words keeps circling back: wind, reeds, water, running, rush, rest, bend, rise, over, under. Nothing new is introduced in the third stanza that was not already present in the first. Instead the words are reshuffled, like a musical phrase passed from one voice to another. "Little" is a nice touch of modesty, too, as if the poet is admitting this is a small exercise rather than a grand symphony.
The imagery rests on a clever double comparison. In the first stanza, wind is likened to water, and the reeds to seaweed, so that dry land is imagined as a sea floor. Then the poem opens out: "in the wind of Time, the mind / Seems to bow and recover." Notice the verb "seems." The speaker does not insist on the resemblance; he offers it tentatively, which suits a poem about something as slippery as consciousness. By the second stanza the comparison has become a chain. Time is "like a stream," and "moods are water-weeds." The mind, in other words, is not the river but the plant swaying in it, moved by forces it does not control.
The poem's rhythm carries the same message. Lines are short and uneven, and they pulse between pressure and release, exactly as the poem describes: "A rush, and a rest, and a stir." That line is itself a small model of the idea, with its three beats, the sudden surge, the pause, the faint movement afterward. The rhyme scheme is loose and a little slippery, never settling into a predictable pattern. Echoes like "water" and "over," "recover" and "river," or "rest" and "proceeds" arrive just often enough to give a sense of recurrence, but not so neatly that the poem feels mechanical. Some rhymes are close, others only hinted at, which keeps the music flowing rather than locking it into place.
The third stanza is where the fugue form pays off. It gathers fragments of the first two and rearranges them: "The bend and the rise, the rest and the rush, / The rush and the reed, and the wind running over." Then comes the most interesting phrase in the poem, "The weigh and the wait of Time." Here "weigh" and "wait" sit so close in sound that they almost blur, and the pairing captures two experiences of time at once: its heaviness, pressing down like the "weight of air" mentioned earlier, and its patience, the sense of endless waiting. Humphries lets sound do the thinking.
Then the poem does something unexpected: it interrupts itself with "—hush!—". The dash and exclamation work like a hand raised for quiet, and the effect is almost tender, as though the speaker has been listening to the wind and suddenly wants us to listen too. After that hush comes the final line, "Forever and ever and ever," which trails off rather than concluding. There is no full stop, no sense of resolution. The poem ends the way a river does, by simply continuing.
What makes "Little Fugue" worth reading is how completely form and meaning are fused. It does not merely tell us that time is ceaseless and that our moods rise and fall; it enacts the process, looping and returning until we feel ourselves swaying with the reeds. For a short poem built from a few plain words, it leaves a surprisingly lasting impression of motion, and of how small a single mind can seem against a current that never stops.