Most nature poems ask us to admire beauty. Colwell's poem asks for something harder: to love a sound that, by his own admission, resembles a rusty hinge. «The Call of the Great Northern Loon» begins as a travel invitation, turns into a portrait of a peculiar bird, and ends with a benediction. Its central idea is that something strange and even ungainly can be the truest voice of a place, and that the wild can answer a spiritual need as surely as a church can.
The opening stanza sets the scene with a question aimed straight at the reader: "Have you passed a night on the shore of a lake / In that northern country, afar?" The question works like a campfire storyteller's opener, drawing the listener in before any description begins. What follows is carefully built through the senses. We see jack pines lifting "sage-green plumes to the evening star," hear the "lap, lap, lap" of waves, and smell "moss-scented air" and "incense sweet from the balsam boughs." The word "incense" matters. By the end of the stanza, smoke, scent and "evening prayer" have turned the lakeshore into a kind of sanctuary, and the poem quietly prepares the religious language of its final line.
The second stanza introduces the loon, and here Colwell does something disarming: he is honest about how the call sounds. Some listeners "call it queer," and he lines up unglamorous comparisons: a rusty hinge, an unoiled cart, an old wooden pump. These are household and farm sounds, humble and a little comic. Yet the stanza turns on a single hinge of its own, the word "But": the sound "strikes a chord in my primal heart." The ugliness of the comparisons makes the confession land harder. The speaker is not claiming the call is pretty; he is claiming it reaches something older than taste. "Primal" suggests an instinct that responds before judgment begins.
The third stanza shifts from sound to behavior, and its rhythm loosens to match the bird's movements. The loons "swim, and dive, / And feed, and sport," and the stacked commas let the day drift by. Then comes the best moment of the poem. "Behold they fade, are gone for a while!" The wording almost sounds like a magician's patter, and the stanza stretches out to mimic the long wait, with its extra lines and repeated "wave." When the bird surfaces "some half a mile" away, Colwell gives it "a large bird-smile," a charmingly odd phrase that makes the loon seem almost cheerful. The phrase "watery grave," used for a creature that has simply dived, adds a flicker of mock-drama, as if the loon escapes death every time it comes up for air.
In the final stanza, the day ends and the poem's two threads, nature and worship, finally join. The sun sinks "gilded," the moon comes "to ride," and the loon flies over "camp, and cabin, shore, and bay," a list that gathers the whole human and natural neighborhood under one pair of wings. His "plaintive, pleading, good night call" becomes "a priest's benediction voiced for all." The comparison feels earned because the poem has been laying incense and prayer in place since the first stanza. Notice too that the creaky "cog-wheel" sound of the earlier stanza returns as "cog-wheel, eerie strains," so the machinery imagery never gets explained away; it is simply redeemed.
Formally, the poem is loose and songlike rather than strict. It uses rhymed lines in varying lengths, with a rolling, anapestic feel in places (the swing of "Have you passed a night on the shore of a lake"), and its stanzas do not all share the same shape. This irregularity suits a subject that is itself irregular and twisting. The old-fashioned "'Tis" and "naught" give it the flavor of a recited campfire verse.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to prettify. Colwell trusts that an honest, slightly absurd comparison can carry more feeling than a polished one, and that the sounds we find odd may be the ones that bring us closest to peace.