To Keats the Nightingale was singing of “summer.” Shelley asks the Skylark:
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?
Again, to the poet’s ear the bird-music awakens memories of the past. To Wordsworth the notes of the Cuckoo brought “a tale of visionary hours” in his boyhood when, in his endeavour to set eyes upon the bird, he would
Often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou were still a hope, a love;