To The Cuckoo by William Wordsworth | Poetry reading about spring (in English)
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To The Cuckoo by William
To The Cuckoo by William Wordsworth is a beautiful spring poem. It describes the way the sound of a cuckoo brings back for the speaker vivid childhood memories. Of all the poems about spring, To The Cuckoo is one of the most evocative.
The poem begins with the speaker welcoming back the cuckoo: ‘O blithe New-comer!’ The word blithe means happy or carefree – the bird is free to fly ‘From hill to hill’ without a care in the world.
The speaker considers calling the cuckoo 'a wandering Voice' due to the fact that he’s heard the bird many times throughout his life, but has never managed to actually see one:
'O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?'
The speaker tells us that whereas the cuckoo only 'babbles' away to the valley about the sun and the flowers - it brings a whole host of precious childhood memories back to him. He goes on explain how the cuckoo has always been a mysterious bird to him. Although he has listened to it every spring, he’s never actually seen it and so it has always been to him ‘a wandering Voice’. However, as a child he spent many hours looking for it:
‘a thousand ways, In bush, and tree, and sky’ ...and roved ‘Through woods and on the green’.
He finds the call of this bird ethereal and mysterious and is completely enthralled by it.
In the second to last stanza, the speaker comes back out of his reverie and tells us how all he has to do is lie on the grass in the spring and listen and as soon as he hears a cuckoo, he’s back in childhood again – his happy childhood of ‘golden time’.
In the final stanza ‘the earth we pace again’ reminds us of the cycles of nature and also the passing of time; the speaker and the cuckoo have spent every spring together. The earth is described as a ‘faery place’, which paints again an air of mystery and also a sense of childhood.
Of all the poets of nature, Wordsworth is probably the most popular of them all. He saw nature as divine and spiritual. According to the Wordsworth Grasmere website he ‘celebrated our relationship with nature and the importance of taking time to appreciate the wonder and beauty of the natural world’. In our modern world, we could view his works as poetry about ecology.
To The Cuckoo
by William Wordsworth
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.
Though babbling only to the Vale
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
The same whom in my school-boy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.
To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
#wordsworth #englishpoetry #englishpoem
The poem begins with the speaker welcoming back the cuckoo: ‘O blithe New-comer!’ The word blithe means happy or carefree – the bird is free to fly ‘From hill to hill’ without a care in the world.
The speaker considers calling the cuckoo 'a wandering Voice' due to the fact that he’s heard the bird many times throughout his life, but has never managed to actually see one:
'O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?'
The speaker tells us that whereas the cuckoo only 'babbles' away to the valley about the sun and the flowers - it brings a whole host of precious childhood memories back to him. He goes on explain how the cuckoo has always been a mysterious bird to him. Although he has listened to it every spring, he’s never actually seen it and so it has always been to him ‘a wandering Voice’. However, as a child he spent many hours looking for it:
‘a thousand ways, In bush, and tree, and sky’ ...and roved ‘Through woods and on the green’.
He finds the call of this bird ethereal and mysterious and is completely enthralled by it.
In the second to last stanza, the speaker comes back out of his reverie and tells us how all he has to do is lie on the grass in the spring and listen and as soon as he hears a cuckoo, he’s back in childhood again – his happy childhood of ‘golden time’.
In the final stanza ‘the earth we pace again’ reminds us of the cycles of nature and also the passing of time; the speaker and the cuckoo have spent every spring together. The earth is described as a ‘faery place’, which paints again an air of mystery and also a sense of childhood.
Of all the poets of nature, Wordsworth is probably the most popular of them all. He saw nature as divine and spiritual. According to the Wordsworth Grasmere website he ‘celebrated our relationship with nature and the importance of taking time to appreciate the wonder and beauty of the natural world’. In our modern world, we could view his works as poetry about ecology.
To The Cuckoo
by William Wordsworth
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear;
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off, and near.
Though babbling only to the Vale
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
The same whom in my school-boy days
I listened to; that Cry
Which made me look a thousand ways
In bush, and tree, and sky.
To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
#wordsworth #englishpoetry #englishpoem
4 ماه پیش
در تاریخ 1402/12/06 منتشر شده
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