Fannie Isabel Sherrick’s “Falling Leaves” is a brief lyric of remarkable compression, a poem that turns an apparently simple social and seasonal scene into a meditation on memory, speech, love, loss, and consolation. Its emotional movement is delicate rather than dramatic. Music subsides, laughter becomes an “undertone,” words are imagined as leaves falling, and the disappearance of the sun gives way to the discovery of stars. The poem does not narrate a specific romantic history; instead, it creates a sequence of suggestive images through which readers may recognize their own experiences of parting and remembrance. This reticence is central to its power. Sherrick understands that sorrow is often most deeply felt not in public catastrophe but in the quiet instant after pleasure has ended, when conversation trails off and one becomes aware of what cannot be held.

The poem belongs to a long tradition of English-language lyric poetry in which autumn serves as a privileged emblem of transience. From Renaissance verse through Romantic poetry and Victorian elegy, falling leaves have offered writers an image at once beautiful and unsettling: they display color at the moment of decline, transforming death into spectacle without erasing its sadness. Sherrick inherits this symbolic vocabulary but applies it especially to language and emotional recollection. Her leaves are not merely natural objects. They become “the words that burn and falter,” utterances that may possess warmth, intensity, and even sacred significance, yet that nevertheless fall away. The poem’s autumnal imagery therefore concerns the fragility of human expression. What we say in moments of love or happiness may feel radiant and permanent, but it enters time, and time alters or disperses it.

The opening immediately establishes an atmosphere of aftermath: “There was a sound of music low— / An undertone of laughter.” The past tense of “There was” is quietly consequential. The music is not simply occurring before the reader; it is already being recalled. Likewise, the laughter is no longer a full and immediate sound but an “undertone,” a word that suggests both a subdued acoustic presence and an underlying emotional current. The phrase resembles the fading resonance that remains after a musical performance has stopped. In this way, the poem begins not at the height of festivity but in its echo. Its subject is not happiness untouched by time, but happiness perceived from a later, more reflective position.

Music and laughter are especially fitting emblems for the poem’s concerns because both are temporal arts. A sound exists only by passing away; a song cannot be preserved in the same manner as a physical object, even if it is remembered or repeated. Sherrick’s “music low” suggests an experience that is nearing silence, while laughter, ordinarily associated with sociability and spontaneity, has already become something faint and layered. The poem thereby encourages a listening reader. Its emotional drama lies in nuances of tone: what remains beneath the cheerful surface, what is heard after the celebratory sound ends, and what private knowledge emerges when communal entertainment gives way to inward reflection.

The question, “The song was done, and can’t you guess / The words that followed after?” invites the reader into a deliberately incomplete narrative. Sherrick does not state the words; she asks us to imagine them. The rhetorical question creates intimacy, as though speaker and reader share a cultural and emotional literacy about what follows music, laughter, and a gathering’s end. One may imagine a declaration, a farewell, a confession, or perhaps the small conventional phrases that become unforgettable because of the circumstances in which they are spoken. The refusal to specify is not a deficiency of detail. It is a technique of universality. By withholding the actual words, the poem permits many memories to enter its silence.

This gesture also recognizes an important truth about remembered love: often the exact language of the past is less enduring than the emotional atmosphere surrounding it. People may forget the literal sentence but retain the room’s music, the timbre of a voice, the sense that an irrevocable moment had occurred. The poem’s first question therefore opens a space between speech and memory. It implies that language matters profoundly, yet it also suggests that words become elusive once they pass into recollection. The reader is asked not to recover a transcript but to feel the pressure of an absent utterance.

In the next movement, Sherrick develops the poem’s governing simile: “Like autumn leaves sometimes they fall— / The words that burn and falter.” The comparison is carefully shaped. Words do not merely vanish; they “fall,” an action that suggests natural inevitability, downward motion, and a visible surrender to seasonal change. Autumn leaves are beautiful precisely because their color is intensified at the moment when they are about to be lost. So too, the “words that burn” may be most vivid because they belong to emotionally charged occasions: moments of desire, apology, tenderness, grief, or separation. Yet they also “falter.” The pairing of burning and faltering captures the instability of human feeling. Passion may glow, but speech may hesitate. A person who feels intensely may be least able to say exactly what is needed.

The image is particularly rich because leaves are both singular and collective. One notices an individual leaf in its color or shape, but autumn is experienced as a multitude of leaves falling together. Sherrick’s plural “words” likewise suggests that memory is composed not of one grand pronouncement alone but of many fragments: phrases overheard, promises made, ordinary exchanges, unfinished sentences. The poem’s emotional world is built from such fragments. A relationship, a season of youth, or a vanished companionship may survive in the mind not as a coherent story but as a scattered foliage of remembered language.

The phrase “Love’s sacred altar” adds a strikingly ceremonial and religious dimension to the poem. An altar is a place of offering, ritual, consecration, and sacrifice. By imagining fading words “upon” such an altar, Sherrick presents love as a force that can sanctify human experience but may also demand surrender. The image is not merely sentimental. It acknowledges that love has costs. To love is to expose oneself to change, separation, imperfect communication, and the possible loss of what has been cherished. The sacredness of love does not protect it from mortality; instead, it may make its losses more painful because what is surrendered has been deeply valued.

This religious imagery reflects a broad tendency in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lyric culture, in which romantic feeling was frequently expressed through the language of devotion. Such language should not be reduced to convention, however. In Sherrick’s poem, the altar metaphor brings together two forms of human longing: the desire to preserve what one loves and the recognition that one may have to relinquish it. The poem asks, “And is it true they too must fade / Upon Love’s sacred altar?” Its uncertainty is essential. The speaker does not assert a doctrine of inevitable emotional extinction with cold confidence. Rather, she voices the question that grief repeatedly asks: must even the words that seemed most alive, most meaningful, and most sanctified become faint?

That question places “Falling Leaves” in conversation with the elegiac tradition. Elegy, broadly understood, is not only poetry written after a death; it is poetry that confronts absence and attempts to create meaning in the face of loss. Sherrick’s poem is elegiac without identifying a deceased person or an irreversible event. Its loss may be the end of an evening, a conversation, a love affair, a youthful period, or simply the passing of time. This indeterminacy gives the poem unusual flexibility. It can be read as a romantic lyric, but it also speaks to friendship, family memory, and the ordinary human experience of looking back upon days that cannot be recovered.

The third movement shifts from the implied intimacy of “you” to a collective statement: “From memory each one of us / Can cull some sweetest treasure.” This turn broadens the poem’s scope. The speaker no longer addresses only a particular companion or imagined confidant; she speaks for a community of rememberers. “Each one of us” is democratic and compassionate. It assumes that everyone possesses some treasured recollection, a moment that can be gathered again from the mind’s storehouse. The verb “cull” is especially resonant. It can mean to select carefully, to gather, or to separate what is valued from what is less useful. In agricultural and botanical contexts, it can also evoke harvesting. Thus memory becomes a kind of autumnal labor: the mind gathers its remaining brightness from what has fallen.

There is, however, a subtle tension in the word “cull.” To cull is not to restore a living branch to its former condition. It is to pick from what is available. The “sweetest treasure” comes from memory rather than from present possession. The phrase conveys gratitude, but it also confirms distance. What the speaker values is already past. In this regard, Sherrick’s poem aligns with a deeply human paradox: remembrance can preserve emotional richness, yet it can also sharpen awareness of what has been lost. The mind keeps faith with the past precisely because the past is no longer physically accessible.

The following statement, “Yet golden days, like golden leaves, / Give pain as well as pleasure,” supplies the poem’s clearest formulation of this paradox. The repetition of “golden” unites human time and the natural world. “Golden days” conventionally evoke an idealized past—youth, love, security, sunlight, beauty, or communal joy. “Golden leaves,” meanwhile, are autumn’s most celebrated visual splendor. In both cases, gold denotes value and radiance. But gold is also the color of ripeness near decline. The poem refuses to separate beauty from impermanence. Indeed, it suggests that the two may be inseparable: the days hurt because they were golden, and the leaves move us because their brilliance is inseparable from their falling.

This balanced acknowledgment of “pain as well as pleasure” gives the poem much of its emotional maturity. Sherrick does not condemn memory as a source of suffering, nor does she treat nostalgia as uncomplicated consolation. Instead, she presents feeling as mixed. This is psychologically persuasive. A beloved memory can comfort the person who remembers it, offering proof that joy once existed; the same memory can wound because it reveals the distance between then and now. Poetry is especially suited to this doubleness because poetic images can hold contrary emotions without forcing them into a simplistic conclusion. “Falling Leaves” does not solve the pain of temporal loss. It teaches the reader to recognize that pain as part of the value of having loved and remembered.

The poem’s return to its opening language is one of its most affecting structural choices. “There was a sound of music low— / An undertone of laughter” reappears, but the repeated scene is transformed by what the intervening reflections have taught us. At first, the sounds create an atmosphere from which a question emerges. When they return, they bear the accumulated weight of the leaf imagery, the sacred altar, and the bittersweet harvest of memory. Repetition here resembles recollection itself. Memory revisits the same moment, but it never returns to it unchanged. The past may be recalled in familiar phrases, yet each return is colored by everything that has happened since.

The final image, “The sun was gone—yet heaven knew / The stars that followed after,” offers consolation, though not a facile or total consolation. The sun’s departure is unequivocal. The poem does not deny night, and it does not pretend that the vanished source of daylight remains present. Yet the word “yet” introduces a countervailing truth. Darkness reveals stars that daylight concealed. In this sense, loss changes perception. What disappears leaves behind grief, but grief may make other forms of beauty, knowledge, and spiritual depth visible. The consolation is not that nothing has ended; it is that ending does not exhaust the universe.

The personification in “heaven knew” is gentle and significant. Heaven appears as a witness possessing knowledge beyond the human speaker’s immediate sorrow. This phrasing gives the ending a quiet metaphysical confidence. Human beings may experience the setting sun as final, but the larger order of creation contains continuities and illuminations not yet visible to them. Such a conclusion has affinities with religious faith, but its power does not depend upon adherence to a narrowly defined doctrine. The stars can be read as spiritual hope, as newly discovered sources of joy, as the enduring presence of memory, or as the artful transformation of sorrow into insight. Sherrick leaves the image open enough to carry all of these possibilities.

There is also a subtle contrast between the poem’s earlier concern with fading words and its final emphasis on celestial signs. Words fall and falter; music ends; laughter becomes low. The stars, however, do not speak in human language. They offer a visual rather than verbal consolation. This may imply that some experiences exceed articulation. When language has become inadequate—when the important words have already been said, forgotten, or lost—the natural world provides another mode of meaning. The night sky does not erase grief, but it expands the emotional field in which grief is felt. The individual mourner, remembering a private moment, looks outward toward a vast and recurring order.

Sherrick’s diction is characteristically accessible, but its simplicity should not obscure its craft. Her key words are monosyllabic or nearly so: “sound,” “song,” “words,” “fall,” “fade,” “love,” “days,” “pain,” “sun,” and “stars.” These plain terms carry emotional force because they are arranged into evocative contrasts: music and silence, laughter and sadness, burning and faltering, gold and decay, sun and stars. The poem does not depend upon elaborate abstraction. Instead, it gives philosophical questions a sensory form. Time is felt as falling leaves; memory is felt as a gathered treasure; consolation is seen in stars emerging after sunset. This concreteness enables the poem to be emotionally immediate while remaining conceptually rich.

The use of questions also contributes to the lyric’s distinctive mood. Questions are acts of openness. They acknowledge uncertainty, invite response, and dramatize the mind’s movement toward understanding. In “Falling Leaves,” the speaker asks whether the reader can guess the words that followed the song and whether those words must fade. These questions do not require literal answers. Their function is to make the reader participate in the poem’s emotional inquiry. One is drawn into an act of imaginative remembering, perhaps recalling one’s own moments after music, celebration, or intimacy, when a few spoken words seemed to alter everything.

Although little biographical information is required to appreciate the poem, its sensibility can be situated within the literary culture that valued the short, musical, emotionally direct lyric. Women poets in particular often worked within forms that literary history has sometimes dismissed too quickly as sentimental. Yet sentiment, when carefully managed, is not mere excess of feeling. It can be a disciplined exploration of attachment, vulnerability, domestic or social experience, and private grief. Sherrick’s poem demonstrates how a seemingly modest lyric can use familiar images to articulate genuine complexity. Its emotional restraint is notable: there are no tears, no explicit abandonment, no detailed scene of catastrophe. The poem trusts implication, allowing its sadness to arise from the relation between lovely things and their inevitable passing.

In this respect, “Falling Leaves” may be compared broadly with Romantic and post-Romantic treatments of nature as a mirror for inward experience. Romantic poets often discovered in seasonal change a language for the self’s encounters with mortality and renewal. Sherrick shares this impulse, but her poem is more intimate and miniature in scale. Rather than presenting nature as a vast force overwhelming the individual, she uses it as a precise analogue for human communication and memory. The autumn leaf is not simply a symbol of death; it is a symbol of the spoken word’s bright, vulnerable life. The stars are not simply emblems of immortality; they are what may be perceived when one’s first source of illumination has gone.

The poem also carries an important philosophy of time. Its movement does not proceed from joy to despair. Instead, it proposes that time alters the meaning of experience. The music is over, but its resonance survives in memory. The words have fallen, but they can be gathered as treasure. The sun is gone, but stars appear. This pattern does not eliminate loss; it reframes it within succession. One form of light gives way to another, and one kind of presence becomes another kind of awareness. The philosophy is neither wholly optimistic nor fatalistic. It is an art of holding endings and continuities together.

Such balance explains why the poem’s final consolation feels earned. If Sherrick had ended only with stars, the conclusion might seem conventionally uplifting. But the preceding images have insisted on pain, fading, and sacrifice. The stars matter because the sun truly has gone. Likewise, if the poem had ended with falling leaves, it might have become an elegant but narrow statement of decline. Instead, its last turn enlarges the emotional horizon. The reader is asked to acknowledge that grief may coexist with gratitude and that darkness may contain forms of beauty unavailable in brighter hours.

Ultimately, “Falling Leaves” succeeds because it honors the intensity of ephemeral things. A low strain of music, subdued laughter, a few uncertain words, the color of leaves, and the first stars after sunset may seem slight when measured against grand historical events. Yet poetry repeatedly reminds us that human life is made of such moments. Sherrick’s lyric understands that what passes quickly may remain inwardly luminous for years. Its autumnal imagery is not merely decorative; it becomes a profound language for the way experience falls away from us while continuing to shape us. With tenderness and intelligence, the poem transforms private wistfulness into a shared meditation on the beauty—and ache—of remembering.

Thomas Moore's "A Temple to Friendship" stands as a masterful exemplar of early nineteenth-century Romantic verse, deceptively simple in its narrative construction yet profoundly sophisticated in its exploration of human emotional complexity. Written during a period when sentimentality and feeling held unprecedented cultural currency, the poem dramatizes a moment of profound psychological revelation—the moment when one form of affection reveals itself to be another entirely. Through its deft characterization, ironic structure, and subtle manipulation of classical imagery, Moore crafts a meditation on self-deception, desire, and the permeable boundaries between different modes of human attachment that resonates far beyond its modest length and seemingly lighthearted surface.

Moore, writing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, occupied a unique position in British literary culture. As an Irish poet who achieved remarkable success in English literary circles, he navigated complex cultural tensions while producing work that spoke to the sensibilities of his age. His poetry, often set to music and widely circulated in drawing rooms across Britain and beyond, participated in the period's fascination with sentiment, classical allusion, and the psychological intricacies of romantic attachment. "A Temple to Friendship" exemplifies these preoccupations while demonstrating Moore's particular gift for narrative compression and ironic wit. The poem belongs to a cultural moment when the language of sentiment had become highly codified, when friendship between men and women occupied an ambiguous and contested space, and when the classical past provided both aesthetic models and convenient disguises for contemporary emotional realities.

The poem's opening gesture establishes both its narrative premise and its tonal complexity. Laura, described as "enchanted," announces her intention to construct a temple to Friendship in her garden—a project that immediately signals the period's enthusiasm for creating private spaces of sentiment and commemoration. The garden temple, a popular feature of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century landscape design, represented more than mere architectural fancy; it embodied the era's desire to sanctify emotional experience, to create physical spaces that would house and honor abstract virtues. That Laura proposes to dedicate her temple specifically to Friendship reveals the high status this particular affection enjoyed in Romantic discourse, positioned as it was between familial obligation and romantic passion, offering a seemingly safer, more rational form of intimate connection.

Yet Moore's characterization of Laura as "enchanted" introduces an immediate note of complexity. Enchantment suggests a state of altered consciousness, a condition in which clear perception has been compromised by the spell of imagination or desire. This single word subtly undermines the rationality of Laura's project even as it is announced, hinting that her understanding of her own motivations may be less transparent than she assumes. The exclamation that follows—"the thought is divine!"—reinforces this sense of enthusiasm verging on self-intoxication. The ease with which Laura moves from conception to execution, compressed into a single sentence, suggests both determination and a certain unreflective haste. She has built her temple before we have time to question whether she has fully examined her own heart.

The dramatic complication arrives swiftly: Laura needs an image of Friendship to complete her shrine, and she turns to a sculptor for this essential component. Here Moore introduces a figure whose function in the poem proves crucial—the sculptor represents both artistic expertise and worldly wisdom, a character who has seen enough of human nature to recognize patterns that the protagonist herself cannot discern. The Friendship he creates is described as "the fairest his art could invent," suggesting that he has produced a technically accomplished work, an idealized representation that should, by conventional standards, satisfy Laura's requirements. Yet Laura's response is immediate and decisive: she finds the image "so cold and so dull" that she cannot imagine enshrining it.

This moment of rejection deserves careful attention, for it reveals the central psychological drama of the poem. Laura's stated objection concerns the aesthetic qualities of the sculpture—its coldness, its dullness, its joyless and dim expression. But these qualities are, in fact, precisely what one might expect from a conventional representation of Friendship, understood as a noble but temperate affection, marked by constancy rather than passion, by steadiness rather than excitement. That Laura finds these qualities unacceptable, that she cannot "think of enshrining" an image that embodies Friendship's traditional attributes, suggests that what she actually seeks is something quite different from what she claims to want. Her rejection of the appropriate symbol exposes the inadequacy of her own self-understanding.

The alternative Laura proposes carries enormous significance. Her eye falls upon "yon little god, upon roses reclining"—a description that unmistakably identifies Cupid, the classical deity of erotic love. The image Moore conjures is rich with sensual implication: the god is "little," suggesting both youth and a certain diminutive charm; he reclines, a posture of ease and invitation; and most tellingly, he reclines specifically upon roses, flowers traditionally associated with passion, beauty, and romantic love. That Laura suggests transforming this figure into an image of Friendship—"We'll make, if you please, Sir, a Friendship of him"—represents either spectacular naiveté or profound self-deception. She proposes to install in her Temple to Friendship an image whose every attribute announces its true nature as Love.

The sculptor's response, delivered in the poem's concluding couplet, provides the interpretive key that unlocks the entire narrative. His farewell to Laura includes the knowing observation that she is "not the first maiden / Who came but for Friendship and took away Love." This statement operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On its surface, it represents the sculptor's worldly recognition of a pattern he has witnessed before—young women who deceive themselves about the nature of their own desires, who approach the threshold of romantic attachment while claiming to seek only platonic connection. But the sculptor's words also suggest a broader meditation on the relationship between Friendship and Love themselves, implying that these categories, while distinct in theory, prove remarkably fluid in practice.

The sculptor's observation gains additional weight from its position as the poem's final statement. Moore grants the last word not to his protagonist but to this figure of experience and knowing, creating an ironic frame around Laura's actions. The poem thus invites us to view Laura's entire project—from its initial conception through its execution—through the lens of this closing revelation. We are encouraged to reread the opening stanzas with new understanding, recognizing the signs of self-deception that were present from the beginning. Laura's enchantment, her divine inspiration, her swift progress from idea to execution—all of these now appear as symptoms of a mind that has not yet acknowledged its true object.

Moore's handling of gender in this poem deserves particular attention, as it participates in and complicates period assumptions about female sentiment and desire. Laura is explicitly identified as a "maiden" and characterized as youthful—the "youthful adorer" who gazes upon the sculptures. This emphasis on her youth and unmarried status places her in a culturally specific position: as a young woman in the early nineteenth century, she would have been expected to navigate the complex terrain between appropriate friendship and dangerous passion with particular care. The cultural anxiety surrounding female desire in this period manifested in elaborate codes governing behavior, speech, and even the acknowledgment of one's own feelings. That Laura must approach her desire obliquely, through the acceptable language of Friendship, reflects these broader cultural pressures.

Yet Moore's treatment of Laura, while ironic, is not simply satirical or dismissive. The poem presents her confusion with a gentleness that suggests genuine sympathy alongside its knowing humor. Laura's inability to recognize her own desire might be read not merely as personal failing but as the predictable result of a culture that offered young women few opportunities to acknowledge or explore romantic feeling directly. The Temple to Friendship becomes, in this reading, a necessary fiction—a way of creating space for emotions that could not be openly claimed. That Laura chooses an image that so obviously represents Love while insisting it will serve as Friendship might indicate not stupidity but rather the workings of a mind that has found an ingenious, if unconscious, solution to an impossible cultural bind.

The poem's engagement with classical imagery enriches its thematic concerns considerably. By invoking the figure of Cupid and the practice of building garden temples—both clearly rooted in Greco-Roman tradition—Moore connects Laura's personal drama to a long cultural history of thinking about love and desire. The classical world, as reimagined by eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture, offered a vocabulary for discussing passion that could seem both elevated and safely distanced from contemporary reality. Yet Moore's use of these classical elements is anything but nostalgic or merely decorative. Instead, he demonstrates how classical imagery might function as a kind of emotional camouflage, allowing desires to be present while remaining nominally unacknowledged.

The sculptor's role in the poem gains additional significance when viewed through this classical lens. As an artist working with traditional forms and figures, he serves as a kind of interpreter between classical tradition and contemporary feeling. His expertise extends beyond technical skill to encompass a understanding of how these traditional forms function in the emotional lives of his clients. He knows, in other words, not just how to carve a convincing Cupid but also what it means when a young woman claims she wants to transform that Cupid into Friendship. His parting comment suggests that he has witnessed this particular transformation—or rather, this particular failure of transformation—many times before, making him a repository of practical wisdom about the relationship between what people claim to want and what they actually desire.

Moore's narrative economy throughout the poem proves remarkable. In a mere sixteen lines, he manages to establish a character, create a dramatic situation, develop that situation to its crisis point, and provide an interpretive frame that retroactively illuminates the entire sequence. This compression serves the poem's thematic concerns beautifully. The speed with which Laura moves from conception to execution to the moment of choice mirrors the impulsive, unreflective quality of desire itself. There is no space in the poem for extended meditation or self-examination; instead, we watch Laura act on instinct and feeling, revealing her true desires through her choices rather than through any process of conscious deliberation.

The poem invites consideration of the broader question of how well we understand our own emotional lives. Laura's case represents an extreme but not uncommon instance of what might be called motivated misrecognition—the tendency to interpret our own desires in ways that align with our self-image or with cultural expectations rather than acknowledging their true nature. The Temple to Friendship becomes a monument to this misrecognition, a structure built on a foundation of incomplete self-knowledge. Yet the poem suggests that this misrecognition may be temporary, that the truth has a way of revealing itself despite our attempts at concealment or disguise. Laura may not yet recognize what she has done, but the sculptor's closing words ensure that the reader does, and they hint that Laura herself will eventually face the reality of what stands in her temple.

The emotional impact of the poem derives largely from this tension between innocence and experience, between Laura's enchanted enthusiasm and the sculptor's knowing commentary. Moore manages to make us feel simultaneously sympathetic to Laura's position and aligned with the sculptor's perspective. We recognize the pathos of her situation—the way cultural constraints and personal psychology have conspired to prevent her from acknowledging her own heart—while also appreciating the humor of her transparent self-deception. This double perspective creates a reading experience that is both touching and amusing, wistful and knowing, much like the complex emotions that attend the recognition of desire itself.

Thomas Moore's "A Temple to Friendship" ultimately offers a sophisticated meditation on the complex relationship between different forms of affection and on the human capacity for self-deception in matters of the heart. Through its deft narrative construction, its deployment of classical imagery, and its ironic framing, the poem explores how cultural expectations, linguistic categories, and personal psychology intersect in the recognition and acknowledgment of desire. Laura's temple, built to honor Friendship but housing Love, becomes a perfect emblem of the divided heart, of the distance that can exist between conscious intention and unconscious motivation. In the space between what Laura claims to want and what she actually chooses, Moore creates room for readers to recognize something fundamental about the human emotional condition—that our desires often arrive ahead of our ability to name them, and that the names we eventually give them may have less to do with their true nature than with what we feel able to acknowledge. The poem's enduring appeal lies in this recognition, in its gentle but penetrating insight into the beautiful, complicated ways we learn what we want by discovering what we have already chosen.