“Yes, it was the mountain echo
Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to the shouting cuckoo
Giving to her sound for sound.”
How poignant is the touch with which he describes the notes of the
fiery-hearted Nightingale, singing in the dusk:
“they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!”
But at sunrise other choristers make different melodies:
“The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.”
Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, he hears all the voices of
nature blending together:
“The Stream, so ardent in its course before,
Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all
Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice
Of common pleasure: beast and bird, the lamb,
The shepherd’s dog, the linnet and the thrush
Vied with this waterfall, and made a song,
Which while I listened, seemed like the wild growth
_Or like some natural produce of the air_
_That could not cease to be_.”
Wordsworth, more than any other English poet, interprets and glorifies
the mystery of sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by the Ear-Gate
listening to the whispers and murmurs of the invisible guests who throng
that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” Indeed the whole spiritual
meaning of nature seems to come to him in the form of sound.
“Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and heaven
With every form of creature, as it looked
Towards the Uncreated with a countenance
Of adoration, with an eye of love.
One song they sang, and it was audible,
Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear,
O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain,
Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.”
No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate motions of nature, the
visible transition of form and outline. How exquisite is the description
of a high-poising summer-cloud,
“That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth all together, if it move at all.”
He sees the hazy ridges of the mountains like a golden ladder,
“Climbing suffused with sunny air
To stop—no record hath told where!”