Wordsworth, in his Preface to the 1815 edition, has the following note on
ll. 3, 4 of the poem:--"This concise interrogation characterises the
seeming ubiquity of the cuckoo, and dispossesses the creature almost of
corporeal existence; the Imagination being tempted to this exertion of
her power, by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo is almost
perpetually heard throughout the season of spring, but seldom becomes an
object of sight." The cuckoo is the bird we associate with the name of
the vale of sunshine and of flowers, and yet its wandering voice brings
back to him the thought of his vanished childhood. We have already
noticed the almost sacred value which Wordsworth attaches to the
impressions of his youth, and even to the memory of these impressions
which remains with him to console his maturer life. The bird is a link
which binds him to his childhood:
"And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again."
In other poems, especially in the _Intimaticns of Immortality_, he speaks
of "the glory and the freshness of a dream," which hallowed nature for
him as a child, and which grew fainter as the "shades of the prison-house
began to close upon the growing Boy".