Second Song To The Same - Analysis

Overall impression

The poem feels playful yet wistful: a speaker responds to a bird's evening call with affectionate imitation that falls short. The tone moves from admiring wonder in the first stanza to amused self-awareness and gentle frustration in the second. The mood shifts slightly from reverent listening to an almost comic resignation.

Authorial and historical note

Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Victorian poet, often explored nature and the limits of human expression. This short piece reflects his interest in natural sounds as vehicles for emotion and the era's attention to feeling shaped by close observation of the countryside.

Theme: Communication and its limits

The poem centers on attempts to communicate across species and between voices. The speaker hears the bird's tuwhoo and tuwhit, notes their echoing power, and then confesses an inability to reproduce them authentically. The repeated lines about echo and imitation emphasize how original expression resists perfect copying.

Theme: Memory and fading

Imagery of sound losing strength—"her voice untuneful grown, / Wears all day a fainter tone"—suggests how moments diminish with time. The bird’s once-vivid call becomes attenuated; the speaker’s parody cannot restore its immediacy, linking memory’s decay to the failure of mimicry.

Symbolic images and their roles

The repeated onomatopoeic phrases tuwhit and tuwhoo function as symbols of both presence and elusiveness: they are concrete sounds yet resist language’s full capture. Echo serves as a symbol of response that alters the original, highlighting how reflection can make expression untuneful or fainter.

Form supporting meaning

The mirrored repetitions and slight variations between stanzas mimic echo and imitation, reinforcing the poem’s subject through its very sound pattern. The short, lyrical form keeps focus tight on a single incident and feeling.

Concluding insight

Tennyson frames a small scene—a birdcall and a human attempt to match it—to probe larger ideas about the play between original voice and copy, and the gentle melancholy of things that cannot be perfectly recaptured. The poem quietly celebrates the beauty of the original while admitting the limits of imitation.