Video narration
You hear a cuckoo somewhere beyond the trees, but every time you turn, there is only distance. The sound is clear; its source is not. That is William Wordsworth's "To the Cuckoo." The bird becomes a voice moving through the landscape-near, then far-an invisible presence that makes the ordinary world mysterious. As the call returns, the speaker travels backward. He remembers being a schoolboy, searching for the bird and never finding it. The present sound opens that childhood world again. Here is the poem's turn: the cuckoo's hiddenness is not a problem to solve. It gives imagination room to work. Because you cannot fix the bird in sight, its voice gathers longing and memory around it. So when you hear the call, you hear more than spring. You hear the past arrive through sound: an unseen cuckoo making childhood present again.