Swinburne’s short lyric makes an audacious claim: a child’s laughter is the sweetest sound in all creation. He lists everything lovely that the world can offer—birdsong, harp music, the rush of water, the wind—and then gently sets them aside. None of them, he insists, can rival the real thing. What the speaker feels is not just affection but a kind of ecstatic wonder. The laughter is described like a burst of pure light, “the very sound of very light,” as if it opens a small window onto heaven. The poem’s mood is tender and celebratory, filled with a soft, rhythmic lilt that almost makes you hear the child’s voice. Even the stanza about the wren becoming a nightingale is no more than a playful shrug—no transformation could ever match the magic of a seven-year-old’s joy. It leaves you feeling that such laughter is a fleeting gift, worth more than nature’s grand symphonies.
A Child's Laughter — Summary
ALL the bells of heaven may ring, All the birds of heaven may sing, All the wells on earth may spring, All the winds on earth may bring All sweet sounds together--- Sweeter far than all things heard, Hand of harper, tone of bird, Sound of woods at sundawn stirred, Welling water's winsome word, Wind in warm wan weather,
One thing yet there is, that none Hearing ere its chime be done Knows not well the sweetest one Heard of man beneath the sun, Hoped in heaven hereafter; Soft and strong and loud and light, Very sound of very light Heard from morning's rosiest height, When the soul of all delight Fills a child's clear laughter.
Golden bells of welcome rolled Never forth such notes, nor told Hours so blithe in tones so bold, As the radiant mouth of gold Here that rings forth heaven. If the golden-crested wren Were a nightingale---why, then, Something seen and heard of men Might be half as sweet as when Laughs a child of seven.