Few poems announce their own sound as boldly as this one. Before you have read a single line, the title has already done a small musical trick: "wavery, quavery" is a pair of words that trembles as you say it. John B. Colwell makes that trembling the refrain of the whole poem, ending every stanza on it, so that the reader is always returning to the owl's voice, the way a listener at dusk keeps turning toward a sound in the trees.
The poem is a portrait of the screech owl's spring song, and the argument folded inside it is that this sound has been misjudged. The opening stanza sets the season carefully: winter "loses his stings," and "contrary March" stops storming and "clings / To the days that caress one." The weather is personified as a grumpy figure softening by degrees, and the parenthesis praising those days as "Anticipatory of Spring's luring ways" gives the speaker a small, happy aside, as if he cannot keep his delight in brackets. Into this gentle transition comes the owl at "twilight's soft fall." The poem's central claim emerges in the final stanza, where the speaker admits that "many a maiden, and many a lad" find the song "too lonely, too sad," and then answers them: "I love its soft quaver, its coaxing, its charm."
What makes the poem work is how it reinterprets the sound. Colwell turns the owl into a courting lover. The bird leaves "his retreat in the evergreen tree" for "a rendezvous," his heart "atune for his lady-love fair." He is a minstrel "tuning his lute to a soft minor key," serenading "his sweetheart." The minor key is the clever detail. Minor keys are what we usually hear as sad, which is exactly why the owl's call strikes some listeners as mournful. The poem keeps the quality but changes its meaning: what sounds lonely to an outsider is, to the listener it was meant for, a thrill. The wording "plaintive call" in the first stanza and "plaintive beseeching" in the last is an echo with a shift in feeling, since the same word moves from neutral description to affectionate defence.
The sound itself is imitated in the verse. The poem is built from rhyming couplets in a bouncing, galloping rhythm, with long lines that tend to carry three or four stresses and a lilting, anapestic swing ("On the softest of wings, like a faint breath of air"). Within that rolling meter, the repeated "wavery, quavery" and the "long drawn out trill" give the ear something to hold. The simile in the third stanza is particularly nice: the tremulous note is "like a chip on a wind rippled water afloat." A chip of wood bobbing on rippled water is a surprisingly exact picture of a wavering pitch, small, light and unsteady but never sinking. The quietness is also physical: the owl flies "on the softest of wings, like a faint breath of air," and is repeatedly called "soft, fluffy fowl." The poem is almost tender about him.
There is gentle humour too. The owl is "this strange little singer, this wise little fowl," and in the last line, a "queer little fowl." Calling a bird "fowl" so often is faintly comic and a little old-fashioned, and "more than beautifully" in the third stanza stretches grammar the way an enthusiastic person does when they run out of ordinary praise. The speaker's voice is warm rather than polished, which suits the subject.
The ending turns inward. The speaker invites the owl to "perch near my casement" and stare "direct at my hearthstone, my earth's paradise." The wild bird is welcomed to the edge of a cosy home, and the speaker's own contentment is the quiet point. The poem's significance lies in this small act of generosity toward a sound many people fear or dismiss. It teaches a way of listening: wait for the twilight, ask what a sound is for, and you may find that what seemed sad is simply a creature in love.