Fountain

In this shimmering meditation on time's passage, James Russell Lowell imagines a speaker drawn to a garden fountain, its waters rising and falling in endless rhythm. Through spare, musical dialogue, the fountain becomes a mirror for human longing: it asks where the speaker's youth has gone, and the answer is as swift and irreversible as water poured out. The poem captures what every generation discovers afresh, that youth springs forth like the fountain's spray, only to vanish before we can hold it. Lowell wields the image of perpetual motion against the fixed fact of human aging with such tender precision that the ache feels almost beautiful. This is a poem for anyone who has watched seasons turn and felt, with sudden sharpness, that the springing grass of their own youth lies behind them. It endures because it names a universal grief with clarity rather than sentimentality, and because its final stanza offers something rarer than comfort: the dignity of accepting what cannot be reclaimed.