The clouds no more are flocking / After the flushing sun... John Freeman’s lyric opens at the precise moment when day lets go. Freeman, an English poet and critic born in 1880, was associated with the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century, a group known for clear diction, rural imagery, and quiet emotional restraint. His poems often listen carefully to the natural world, and “Who is it that Answers?” belongs to that meditative tradition: a twilight scene that turns inward, where the fading light of an outer landscape becomes the setting for an inner exchange.
What begins as description quickly becomes a drama of listening. In the first stanza the natural world winds down: bees end their long droning, the bat’s hunt is begun, and the tired wind lies like a shadow still. That last phrase is repeated, as if the evening itself is holding its breath. Out of this hush, the second stanza asks, Who is it that’s calling / Out of the deepening dark? The repetition of calling, calling, calling makes the sound both urgent and ungraspable. The third stanza shifts from the question of a caller to the question of an answer: Who is it that answers / Out of a quiet cloud? The answer turns out to be no ghost or external voice. My voice, my heart went answering. The central idea is the dissolution of any clear boundary between self and world. The speaker hears a call in darkness and finds that the response is his own heart’s movement. The poem does not celebrate this as revelation; it records it as something strange and grave, an encounter with one’s own solitude.
Freeman’s form mirrors that quiet drama. Each stanza closes with a chime on hill and still, so the word still becomes a refrain that shifts meaning as the poem moves: first the physical stillness of wind, then the sweetness of the imagined voice, and finally the emotional gravity of the speaker’s own answer. The meter is loose but song-like, alternating longer lines such as And the tired wind that went flittering with the short, suspended Up and down the hill. That repeated movement of going up and down the hill suggests both the wanderer’s path and the rise and fall of a voice. The rhyme is soft and sometimes slant—sun and begun, dark and hark, cloud and aloud—which keeps the poem from feeling mechanically tidy. The abrupt No!--yet hark! in the middle stanza acts like a sudden intake of breath, breaking the descriptive calm and forcing attention.
The poem’s imagery moves from active to nearly silent. The clouds are flocking, the sun is flushing, bees drone, and the bat begins its hunt; then the verbs soften into lies and wakes. The phrase a quiet cloud is especially delicate because it turns a visual image into an almost auditory one, as if the cloud itself could murmur. The words cried at last aloud blur the line between speech and thought. Did the speaker actually speak, or only imagine doing so? The poem leaves that question open. When the answer comes—Stay, oh stay! I come, I come!—it sounds like lovers’ language, full of longing and delay. Yet the voice is “mine so strange and still, / mine grave and still.” The adjectives small, sweet, strange, and grave map the changing tone of the experience: wonder turns to recognition, and recognition turns to solemnity.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about inwardness. It does not pretend that nature speaks, nor does it deny the power of the moment. Instead, it dramatizes how a human being, in the long quiet of evening, can answer his own call without recognizing the voice at first. For Freeman’s Georgian contemporaries, rural twilight often provided comfort or nostalgia. Here the quiet is not exactly comforting; it is a place where the self becomes strange to itself. That is a small but lasting achievement: a lyric that listens until the heart’s own echo is heard clearly, and then accepts its grave stillness.