Poem #2 Close Reading

The first two lines of the poem had similar rhythm with emphasis on roughly every other syllable. “Spring” and “sing” illustrate masculine rhyme, echoing the aforementioned bird song with the short “i”. The second stanza continues with a description of specific birds—the thrush and robin that sing in the holly-bush or “covert” as referenced in the first stanza. “Bush” and “thrush” are arguably slant rhyme as are “boughs” and “house” of the following stanza. The fourth stanza makes use of alliteration with the repetition of the soft “s” that compounds the almost romantic naturalistic description of “sweet scents” and “whispering air.” The air by the end of the fourth stanza is personified and its soft words comprise the final two stanzas. The fifth stanza is similar to the first in its parallel sentence structure and masculine rhyme of “alone” and “stone.” The notion of the “sun shineth/most shadily” is oxymoronic in a literal sense, but humorous as well by personifying the sun. The poem ends with the image of the “far sea” that is physically far from the singing birds in the thrush that the speaker began with. By the last line of the fourth stanza, poem’s mood shifts with the negative connotations of “snare”, “alone” and “shadily” that juxtapose the cheery images of spring just above while harking back to the first line’s mention of winter. I would suggest that the speaker uses scenes from nature as a metaphor, although the object of which I am unsure of and I hesitate to default to the usual suspects (?) of “love”, “life” and “poetry.” Or perhaps all poetry boils down to the human condition/mortality.