The speaker begins with a fleeting, almost nostalgic vision—a dream of a lost, sunlit world where a stream might hold a pure nymph, a child of the sun, eternally loving. This imaginary beauty feels intoxicating but also unreal, like a tempting poison. Before he fully succumbs, the longing fades, and he finds himself simply looking into the actual water, seeing it more vividly than any divine or human figure. He listens instead of yearns.
That shift opens the real heart of the poem. The sedge-warblers piped up with a quick, shrill, even grating song, completely lacking melody or pretty words. Yet, in that moment, their tuneless, endless repetition struck him as far dearer than the sweetest human singing. The birds were singing something no lesson could teach—a wordless, living truth. The poem settles into a quiet, alert contentment, where May’s best offering isn’t a mythical ideal but the immediate, rough-edged music of the world as it actually is.