A bird calls, and the poem cannot move on from it. The phrase "again and again" turns up nine times in twenty short lines, and "You hear this calling" returns five times. The poem opens and closes on the same couplet, "You hear this calling. A bird / again and again," so the call is still going when the poem stops. Nothing in the text says what the bird wants or even what kind it is. What matters is what the sound does to the person listening.
The poem's central movement is a slow loss of self. At first the speaker is still active and still thinking. "What sign / can I give to myself?" suggests someone trying to answer the call or make sense of it. A few lines later the speaker withdraws: "I ask / to speak only to myself." By the middle the verbs have changed from speaking to receiving. "Now I / listen to be hearing" is an odd, almost circular phrase. Listening no longer aims at anything the speaker could learn. It has become a state to sink into. Then comes the poem's most striking image: "The voice / falls off of me, found dumb." The voice is something that can be shed, like a coat or old skin, and "found dumb" has the ring of a verdict, as though silence were something the speaker was discovered in rather than chose. The last admission, "I have / lost my voice, for want of myself," plays on two senses of "want." The voice may be lost because the self is missing, or because the speaker longs so hard for it. The poem lets both readings stand.
The form carries this idea. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, often only five or six syllables, and they break in awkward places. "A bird" ends one line and "again and again" starts the next, so the repetition arrives like a second call answering the first. Sentences often spill over the line ending: "What is the night, to such / a calling bird?" That question is quietly strange. It asks what night means to a creature that calls into it, and it hints that the speaker has begun to see the dark through the bird's eyes, not their own. The punctuation is loose too, with full stops jammed against the next word ("calling.A bird") and commas followed by capital letters ("Again and again, Now I"). Whether this is deliberate or an accident of the text as printed, it makes the sentences run together and stumble, which suits a speaker whose grip on speech is failing.
The pronouns also repay attention. The poem begins with "You hear," addressing someone, perhaps a reader, perhaps the speaker's own divided self. Only afterwards does "I" appear. By the end the two seem to have merged into one overwhelmed consciousness, and the refrain comes back in the second person as if the poem were insisting that the listener cannot escape.
The title adds a puzzle. "A Hundred Voices at Once" promises a crowd, but the poem gives us one bird and one speaker. The multitude seems to be made by the repetition itself. Say a single call enough times and it begins to sound like many, until it fills the space where the speaker's own voice used to be. The result is a paradox: the more voices there are, the less the speaker can say.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It has almost no scenery and no story, just a handful of plain words, and by repeating them it makes the reader feel the pressure the speaker feels. We may even catch ourselves going quiet as the refrain comes round again. It asks what happens to a person who listens so completely that nothing of their own is left to say, and it gives no comforting answer. The bird goes on calling.