A loved one’s singing stays with the speaker long after the voice has gone. In the first remembered moment, the song is bright and lilting, full of laughter and glad surprise. Later, the voice slows into delicate, dreamy measures about moonlit trees and the secret world of night and lovers. That shift from joyful singing to softer, moonlit crooning hints at deepening intimacy and the passage of time. Now the speaker can no longer hear that voice, but love still keeps its melody alive. For someone listening with real hunger, silence itself becomes a sounding thing.
That final image gives the poem its tender, elegiac mood—warm with memory, yet shadowed by loss. The silence is not empty; it is filled by attention and longing. The speaker suggests that love can preserve what the ear can no longer receive, turning absence into a private, enduring music.