The How And The Why - Analysis

A mind that wants a tutor, not a sermon

The poem’s central claim is that the deepest human hunger is not for answers but for an adequate teacher—someone who can make the world’s basic facts feel intelligible. The speaker begins as any man’s suitor, offering himself up to whoever will be his tutor. That word choice matters: he’s not asking for comfort, and he’s not declaring faith; he’s pleading for instruction. The voice is urgent but oddly plainspoken, like someone pacing and talking aloud. Even the opening reflections on time—no present in time, and no future, no past in eternity—land less like doctrine than like dizziness: if our categories collapse, how do we live inside them?

Time, eternity, and the vertigo of ordinary life

Right away the poem sets a tension between the sheer normality of living and the mind’s inability to reconcile it. The speaker lists life’s blunt cycle—We laugh, we cry, are born, we die—and then immediately asks, Who will riddle me what it means. The tone turns on that hinge: the facts are simple, but their meaning won’t hold still. The contradiction is sharp: life is described as either pleasant or something that speedeth fast, yet the speaker can’t even locate a stable present to stand in. The poem keeps returning to this mismatch—between what we do every day and what we can actually explain about it.

Nature as a whispering classroom that won’t translate

The second movement floods the page with the natural world, as if the speaker is searching for a lesson written into things themselves. The bulrush nods and the wheatears whisper, but the speaker can only ask, What is it they say? Nature looks like a conversation he can’t overhear. Then the questions jump from the charming to the metaphysical without warning: Why two and two make four? sits beside Why the rocks stand still and the light clouds fly? The poem refuses to separate math, physics, and feeling. Even trees are given emotional bodies—the heavy oak groans, white willows sigh—as if the world itself is expressive, yet expression does not equal explanation.

That piling-up creates a distinctive tone: half childlike wonder, half adult frustration. The speaker’s questions are not decorative; they press on basic oppositions—deep is not high, high is not deep—and then turn inward: How you are you? Why I am I? The external world becomes a mirror that forces the most personal riddle: identity feels as arbitrary as the fact that round is not square.

Somewhat everywhere, certainty nowhere

The third stanza is the poem’s bleakest simplification. After all the images, the world is reduced to a shrug: The world is somewhat, and it goes on somehow. The speaker can sense something and knows there is somewhat, but can’t name it, ground it, or even decide whether it is himself: I cannot tell if that somewhat be I. This is the poem’s key tension stated nakedly: the speaker has intuition without definition, feeling without a stable object. The language of vague nouns—somewhat, somehow—isn’t laziness; it dramatizes a mind whose strongest experience is the failure to specify what it experiences.

Bird-voices: why as lament, how as challenge

The birds provide the poem’s most vivid allegory of inquiry. A little bird repeats why? why? when the sun falls low, while a great bird answers from the opposite bough with how? how?—not in dialogue but in confrontation, since he stares in his face and shouts. Then the black owl takes over, chanting how? how? all night. The shift from evening to night matters emotionally: the poem moves from puzzled curiosity into a kind of nocturnal obsession. Why sounds plaintive, like wanting meaning; how becomes relentless, like mechanism grinding on. Together they show that neither kind of question satisfies the other: reasons do not explain processes, and processes do not explain purposes.

Blood, soul, steeple, chimneypot: the riddle of what counts as an answer

The closing questions pull the inquiry back to human stakes: Why the life goes when blood is spilt? and where the soul may lie? But the poem also asks why we build what we build: a church with a steeple, a house with a chimneypot. That pairing suggests the speaker suspects our explanations are partly architectural—visible habits that stand in for knowledge. We mark meaning with steeples; we manage living with chimneys; neither tells us what life is. The final refrain shifts slightly—now it’s how and the what, then what and the why—as if the speaker has learned that the hardest missing piece may be what itself: not just how things work or why they matter, but what they are in any final sense.

If the world keeps whispering and nodding, why does the speaker feel so untranslated? The poem’s most unsettling implication is that meaning might be present everywhere—birds calling, trees groaning, time moving—without ever becoming legible to the human mind that craves a tutor.