The cuckoo is traditionally the bird that announces spring, and here it is the one sound the speaker cannot hear. Someone beside her says, "That's the cuckoo," and she answers flatly, "I cannot hear it." What follows is a short account of why. The speaker is evidently a widow, and the poem is about how a death can take over the way a person hears the world, so that a sound of renewal becomes a reminder of loss.
The story is told backwards. She cannot say when she last heard the cuckoo, but she knows "too well the year when first I failed to hear it." That year, her husband's shout of "Ho! Ho!" to his sheep covered the bird's call. He "died that Summer," and the cuckoo, the listening children and her own dismissive "Nay" have stayed fused with that memory ever since. The poem never says outright that her deafness and her bereavement began together, but putting the two so close invites the reader to link them. Her deafness may be physical, but it also works as a figure for grief.
The poem's central idea lies in its use of "drowned." In the first stanza the shepherd's voice drowns the cuckoo, a small domestic accident. In the last line the same word returns with far greater weight: even if she recovered her hearing, "the cuckoo's note would be drowned by the voice of my dead." The first drowning is a passing noise, and the second is permanent and inward. Her husband's voice is now more present to her than anything the living world can offer. The conditional phrasing, "even if I could lose my deafness," hints at something else. "Lose" is the verb we use for things we would rather keep, and the line leaves room to wonder whether she would swap this deafness for the cuckoo even if she could.
The writing is plain and spoken. Words like "my man," "Nay" and "that was his way" suggest a country voice with no interest in fine phrasing. The affection is hidden in the understatement. He shouted "ten times with an angry voice," yet "not in anger, for that was his way." In that brief correction she is defending him and also remembering him accurately, which says more about the marriage than any declaration of love would. The repeated "Ho! Ho!" is a rough, cheerful, ordinary sound that she has turned into a refrain of mourning.
The form supports this. The lines are long and loose, and they sound more like someone talking than reciting. Each stanza has four lines, and the second and fourth lines always rhyme: "know" with "Ho! Ho!", "way" with "Nay," and "instead" with "dead." Those rhymes land on the key sounds of the poem, the shepherd's call, her refusal, and the dead themselves. The first and third lines are less tidy. The first stanza ends them both on the same words, "hear it," which gives a sense of her going round the same fact. In the other stanzas the pairing is much looser, so the pattern slackens as the poem goes on, much as memory does. The final rhyme, "dead," closes the poem with a thud.
There is also a quiet reversal at the start of the last stanza, where she says "as you said, 'There it is.'" The companion's cheerful announcement reaches her, but what she hears is "not the cuckoo at all." The word "instead" carries the poem's whole argument, because the present moment is replaced by the past.
The poem is significant because it takes a familiar subject, birdsong in spring, and refuses to give the reader the expected comfort. The cuckoo never appears except as something missed. In fewer than a hundred words the poem also gives a whole life: a farm, a marriage, children, a death, and years of absence. It makes the point that grief does not always show itself in tears. It can be as ordinary as failing to hear a bird that everyone else can.