Four short lines are enough to fit a window, a pain, an awkward posture and a bird. The speaker never says what he feels about any of it. Instead the poem lets one odd image and a few plain statements do the work, and the result is a small scene about how we notice the world when we aren't trying to.
The opening line makes a claim that sounds almost impossible: "My window was infinite as a ring." A window has edges and a frame, and it shows only a slice of the outside. A ring, though, has no beginning or end, so it can stand for something endless. Joining the two gives a paradox: a bounded view that somehow doesn't feel bounded. The image also suggests a round window, though the poem doesn't say so. The word "ring" may also carry a sound. A head that aches can ring, and a ring can be a bell. Judging by the imagery, the poem is already moving from seeing to hearing before the dove arrives.
Then comes the abrupt "My head ached." It is the shortest sentence in the poem, and it drops in like a pang. After the wide, dreamy first line, the speaker is pulled back into a body that hurts. The line lengths follow this shift. They run from ten syllables to three, then to eight, then to four, so the poem tightens and loosens like a held breath. There is no rhyme, but the sounds still connect. "Ached" and "day" share a long *a*, and "speak" echoes the hard *k* of "ached." These links are quiet enough to feel accidental, which suits the poem's mood.
The third line is the strangest: "Sitting backwards, I heard a dove." The speaker isn't looking at the infinite window. He has turned away from it, whether on a chair, a seat, or in some other way the poem leaves open. This turn matters. The window promised a huge view, but what he actually gets comes from behind him, as sound. Because he can't see the dove, he has to listen to it. The aching head may help here. Pain narrows attention and makes us stop reaching for the big view, and that may be exactly what lets a small sound come through.
The last line gives the poem its meaning: the dove does not speak *to* him but "with the day." The preposition is the key word. "With" makes the day a conversation partner, as if morning itself has a voice and the dove is answering it. This is personification, but a gentle one, and the dove's soft, repeating call fits the idea of a murmured exchange more than a performance. The title then falls into place. An eavesdropper listens in on talk meant for someone else. The speaker is not the dove's audience. He is a bystander, sitting backwards, with a sore head, catching a private dialogue between a bird and a day.
That is the central idea. The world carries on its own conversations, and we sometimes catch them only when we are off balance, in pain, or facing the wrong way. The poem doesn't turn this into a lesson. Notice that "infinite" appears in the first line and the dove's small voice in the last. Between them the poem shrinks from the endless to the intimate without losing any of its scale. The overheard moment feels as big as the window.
The poem's significance lies in this economy. It resembles haiku in how much it leaves unsaid, though it doesn't follow any syllable pattern. It gives no reason for the headache, no explanation of the posture, and no commentary on what the dove "means." A reader can fill those gaps in many ways: illness, tiredness, a long journey, a sleepless night. That openness is what makes the poem worth rereading. It shows, in a few words, that attention is a kind of listening and that the best things we notice are sometimes the ones we weren't meant to hear.