Evening falls in “Who is it that Answers?”: clouds stop chasing the sun, bees fall silent, bats appear, and the wind drops into stillness. From that quiet darkness, the speaker hears a faint call and then, from a cloud, what sounds like a reply — “Stay, oh stay! I come, I come!” The moment feels otherworldly until the speaker realizes that the answering voice is his own voice, his own heart echoing across the hill.
That final turn gives the poem its strange, intimate mood. It is less about a real voice than about solitude, longing, and the way a hushed landscape can make a person hear their own deepest feelings as if they came from outside. The mood is still, twilit, slightly eerie, but also tender and grave. It’s a quiet recognition: what seems to call from the dark is really the speaker’s own longing made audible.