Second Song To The Same - Analysis

Night-echo as a kind of music lesson

The poem’s central pleasure is its admission that natural sound can be more convincing than any human imitation. The speaker listens to the owl’s calls—tuwhits and tuwhoos—and frames them not as random noises but as something like a performance that the landscape answers back to. The call floats upon the dark and took echo with delight, as if the night itself cooperates, amplifying and beautifying what the bird begins. In that setting, the owl’s voice seems effortlessly musical, and the speaker sounds like a fan describing a favorite refrain.

Yet there’s already a small sadness in the way the poem insists the calls are now lull’d. What was bright in yesternight has faded into daytime hush, and the echo’s delight is gone with it.

The day after: when even the echo grows tired

The most telling shift comes when the poem personifies the echo as her voice, which has become untuneful grown and wears all day a fainter tone. This is a gentle but pointed reversal: at night, the owl’s cry makes the world sing back; by day, the world’s answering voice has thinned out, like someone hoarse after too much talking. The tone here is lightly comic—echo as a woman whose voice has gone flat—but it also underlines how dependent the magic is on the right conditions. The same sound in the wrong hour doesn’t carry.

Flirtation by parody, and the embarrassment of failing

In the second stanza the poem turns from description to desire: I would mock thy chaunt anew. Mock here is affectionate, closer to teasing imitation than ridicule, especially because the goal is courtship: Thee to woo to thy tuwhit. The speaker tries to enter the owl’s own call-and-response world, making himself a rival owl or a comic partner who can keep the duet going.

But the tension that gives the poem its small bite is the confession of incapacity: I cannot mimick it, Not a whit. The poem ends with a long, theatrical spill of sound—Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o—that is both performance and proof of failure. It’s exuberant, but it also reads like someone trying too hard, stretching the syllables the way you might stretch a note you can’t quite hold.

A comic poem with a real limit in it

What stays with you is how the poem uses play to mark a boundary: the speaker can write down the owl’s sounds, and even stage a little serenade with lengthen’d loud halloo, but he can’t recreate the original authority of the owl in its own night. The tone remains bright and singable, yet the ending lands on a human kind of embarrassment—the wish to join an older, surer music, and the awareness that your version will always be an imitation.