Voices Of The Night 0 Prelude - Analysis

A poem that turns nostalgia into a command

This prelude begins as a luxuriant memory of lying under trees, but it is really a story about an artist being redirected. The speaker goes to the woods looking for childhood’s dream-state—that slumberous sound of leaves and the bright visions it once produced. Yet the poem’s central claim is sharper: you can return to the sources of song, but you cannot keep their innocence. The woods can still summon him, but they can’t give him back the child who first heard them. Instead, the visit becomes an initiation into a new subject matter: not landscapes and legends, but the darker, inward material of Life’s deep stream and the unsettling Voices of the Night.

The tone therefore begins tender and almost drowsy—thick shade, slow motion, half-dream—and ends with something like an oracle’s severity. What starts as a picnic under a patriarchal tree becomes a commissioning speech.

The green canopy as a machine for dreaming

In the opening movement, the woods are built like a sheltered architecture. The unbroken roof of leaves and sloping eaves create an interior space where the shadows hardly move. That stillness matters: it’s the condition for the mind to drift. Even sound arrives in a softened, after-image way—like the echo of a bell no longer swings, leaving only a hollow murmur over meadow, lake, and stream. The poem keeps translating nature into half-human, half-spiritual signals: the leaves clapped their little hands, and the sound becomes innumerable wings. Under this canopy, imagination is not something the speaker forces; it happens to him, as naturally as shade and light alternate come and go.

That alternation—shadow to sunlight, waking to dream—already hints at a tension the poem will later harden: the mind wants the sweetness of reverie, but it also registers the world’s darker register. The woods aren’t simply pretty; they are a threshold.

Old legends, and the private holy land of song

From that threshold, the speaker’s dreams take a particular shape: not modern plots, but old legends of the monkish page, traditions of the saint and sage, and tales that have the rime of age. These are not random tastes; they describe a youth whose imagination is fed by inherited, devotional, half-medieval material—stories already seasoned by time and belief. And the poem insists that this taste persists even in modern crowds: Even in the city’s throng he can still feel the freshness of the streams that water the green land of dreams.

But notice the subtle doubleness in that line about the city. The speaker can carry the holy land of song within him, yet he calls it a land of dreams—lush, green, and somewhat separate from the city’s pressure. The poem is already setting up the problem: how long can song remain a refuge before it must become a responsibility?

Pentecost and the woods that speak like childhood

When the speaker returns to the woodlands at Pentecost, spring is personified as a bride, and even the plants appear in vestments: bishop’s-caps with golden rings. The religious calendar matters less as doctrine than as atmosphere—a world where nature seems to participate in blessing. In this consecrated season, the trees become intimate beings: they whispered low and mild, they were his playmates when a child, they rocked me in their arms, and they still smiled as if I were a boy.

It’s a seductive scene because it offers precisely what the speaker wants: not just beauty, but recognition. The woods call him by his former self: Come, be a child once more! And he yields—I could not choose but go—as if the invitation were irresistible, or even fated. Yet that yielding also exposes the poem’s main contradiction: the adult chooses the return, but the return requires believing you can be chosen back into childhood. The woods may speak, but they cannot undo time.

The hinge: from prayerful stillness to an avenue of pines

The poem’s most important turn happens after the speaker enters the solemn wood and stands among a nature that seems to be kneeling at her evening prayer. This is not the playful childhood grove; it is quiet, almost liturgical. Then an avenue of tall and sombrous pines rises before him, and the light becomes strange: sunshine darted through, spreading a vapor soft and blue in long and sloping lines. The setting shifts from open daydream to something like a corridor—directed, narrowing, serious.

In that corridor, memory comes back with physical insistence: the dreams of youth fall on his weary brain like a fast-falling shower. The metaphor is tender—low lispings of rain on grain—but the word weary matters. The adult mind is not an empty field; it is tired, already loaded with experience. So when he cries, Visions of childhood! Stay, it sounds less like a child speaking than like someone pleading with a vanishing medicine.

The refusal: It cannot be! and the end of pastoral subjects

Right at the height of longing, the poem introduces distant voices that answer him—not kindly, but truthfully: It cannot be! They pass away! This is the poem’s clearest emotional pivot. The earlier whisper of the trees said, return; these voices say, you can’t. They also give a blunt vocational verdict: Other themes demand thy lay; / Thou art no more a child! The tenderness is replaced by duty.

What follows is a redefinition of where song truly lives. The voices insist the land of Song is not out in the scenery but within thee, watered by living springs. Even Fancy is recast: her sleepless eyes are gates, not toys. The imagery grows explicitly spiritual—Holy thoughts, like stars, angels’ wings—as if imagination must now answer to a higher seriousness than mere pleasure.

Then comes the strongest renunciation in the poem: he must learn his song will be not mountains capped with snow, nor forests sounding like the sea, nor the familiar river scene where woodlands bend under bending heavens. The poem does not say these subjects are false; it says they are no longer sufficient. The tension is not between nature and the city as places, but between beauty as retreat and beauty as witness.

The industrial vision and the command to write from the heart

The voices replace the pastoral forest with a new one: a forest where the din / Of iron branches sounds. Where the earlier leaves made a continuous, dreamy hush, this forest clangs. And instead of a clear river reflecting heaven, there is a mighty river where whoever looks sees the heavens all black with sin and cannot see its depths or bounds. The poem suddenly admits a modern world—industrial, moralized, vast—and it does so without naming factories or cities directly. It’s enough to say iron, din, and a sky turned black.

Even hope becomes seasonal wreckage: after soft rays of sunshine, a fearful wintry blast arrives; hopes fall like withered leaves, and pallid lips declare, It is past! / We can return no more! That line echoes the earlier refusal of childhood, but now it feels broader: not just the loss of youth, but the loss of easy faith that life will renew itself without cost.

So the poem ends on its most direct instruction: Look, then, into thine heart, and write! The new subject is everything the earlier canopy sheltered him from—All forms of sorrow and delight, all the solemn Voices that can soothe or affright. The speaker went to the woods to be comforted; he leaves with a mandate to tell the truth about what frightens him as well.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If the trees once invited him to be a child once more, and the later voices insist Thou art no more a child, which voice is more faithful to nature? The poem seems to suggest that nature contains both: the seductive dream of return and the stern law of seasons, where leaves wither and do not come back as the same leaves. In that sense, the woodlands hoar are not contradicting themselves—they are teaching him, at last, how to hear them whole.