A lonely childhood, the speaker of "In a Vale" insists, was anything but empty. He grew up beside a misty fen, and every night it filled his room with company: pale girls in trailing garments, each one a flower, each arriving "singly unto her place" and talking until the stars began to fade. What the poem really describes is what that solitude gave him, a kind of knowledge.
The central idea arrives in the last two stanzas. At dawn the last visitor goes "Back to the place from which she came– / Where the bird was before it flew, / Where the flower was before it grew, / Where bird and flower were one and the same." Before they were separate creatures, flower and bird shared a single source. That is why the speaker can claim to know "Why the flower has odor, the bird has song": scent and music are two outward forms of one origin. Yet he never actually explains. "You have only to ask me, and I can tell," he says, and the poem ends before anyone asks. His knowledge belongs to listening, not to argument. Judging by the imagery, the pale maidens read as the imagination at work, a lonely child giving faces and voices to what he sees and hears, though the poem never says so and asks us to take the visits at face value.
The construction is neat but unobtrusive. There are five stanzas of five lines, each rhymed ABAAB, so three lines in every stanza chime on one sound: vale, pale, trail; bloom, room, gloom; dew, flew, grew. The repetition suits a fen that "rang all night," because the same note keeps returning. It also gives the fourth stanza's parallel lines, "before it flew" and "before it grew," a near-incantatory pull. The rhythm is loosely four-beat and mostly iambic, but it slackens whenever it likes. "When I was young, we dwelt in a vale" ambles along with extra syllables, so the poem sounds like someone telling a story rather than reciting one.
The word choice does a similar double job. Words like "vale," "wist," "fain" and "list" give the poem the air of an old ballad or fairy tale. Beside them sit plain, almost conversational lines such as "You have only to ask me." The mixture suggests a man who half believes his own legend and is not embarrassed about it. The phrase "one so lonely was fain to list" is telling, too. Loneliness is not pitied here. It makes him the ideal audience, and the visitors seem to need him as much as he needs them, since "they brought so much to say."
The imagery is built around thresholds. The maidens' garments trail "across the reeds to a window light," and their voices come "across the sill from the outer gloom." The speaker stays inside, receiving, while the natural world crosses into his room. The senses blur as well. The flowers have faces and voices, and the fen rings like a bell. The last visitor goes "heavy with dew," a detail that is physical and tender at once. She seems weighed down by the night's talk, and the dew ties her to the morning she is returning to.
Time works quietly in the poem too. It begins in the past ("When I was young") but slides into the present with "a voice that has sounded in my room" and "I know so well." The visits are not over; they have become part of how he thinks. The final lines, "No, not vainly there did I dwell, / Nor vainly listen all the night long," have a slightly defensive double negative. It sounds as if someone might have doubted that those sleepless, solitary nights were worth anything. The poem answers by turning loneliness into an education.
That is what makes it worth reading. In twenty-five modest lines it makes a large claim: close attention, even lonely attention, is a way of knowing, and the beauty of a scent and the beauty of a song may come from the same place.