On a rainy walk, the speaker stops because he keeps hearing a bird call out what sounds like “wet my foot.” As he stands puzzling over the noise, a bird flushes from right beside him—rainwater bouncing off her chest—and he realizes he nearly stepped on her nest. Crouching down, he finds a neat cup of eggs. When he meets a shepherd in the valley and tells him, the man smiles with recognition: it’s a quail’s nest, one he’d already spotted with as many as fifteen eggs inside. The whole encounter feels hushed and lucky, full of the gentle surprise of stumbling onto something easily missed. That quiet feeling deepens in the last lines, which brush away our sense of knowing the landscape. Quails, the poem murmurs, feed among foreign birds, fly low and briefly in summer, and almost no one knows where they breed or where they vanish to. The mood stays warm and intimate, but touched by a sense of mystery—a secret the walker and the shepherd share for a moment before the bird slips back into obscurity.
Quail's Nest — Summary
I wandered out one rainy day And heard a bird with merry joys Cry "wet my foot" for half the way; I stood and wondered at the noise,
When from my foot a bird did flee-- The rain flew bouncing from her breast I wondered what the bird could be, And almost trampled on her nest.
The nest was full of eggs and round-- I met a shepherd in the vales, And stood to tell him what I found. He knew and said it was a quail's,
For he himself the nest had found, Among the wheat and on the green, When going on his daily round, With eggs as many as fifteen.
Among the stranger birds they feed, Their summer flight is short and low; There's very few know where they breed, And scarcely any where they go.