Yes! Full Surely 'Twas the Echo by William Wordsworth -- Analysis

Wordsworth's poem, "Yes! Full Surely 'Twas the Echo" is a meditation on the pseudo-science of divine conversation. When I was in Ecuador, I drank the psychedelic brew of Ayahuasca under a thatched hut. Closing my eyes, a world of neon-nature-patterns bloomed, flowed in an ever-changing tapestry of vision. A voice called out to me, it advised me -- it said, "Shut up and Listen!"

Wordsworth opens the poem listening to a Cuckoo's echoing song. It's a "Solitary, clear, profound" song, and is reimbursed "sound for sound" by an echo. He ponders the origin of this echo -- "Whence the voice?" he wonders, "from air or earth?" Here -- the poem begins leaning toward the spiritual, as if the echo is of divinity born.

The echo was similar, but "oh how different." What, after all, is an echo, but a sound that hits a wall and bounces back? Wordsworth disagrees -- an echo is not a re-sounding, but an Answer. This poem might have been called, "An Echo is God Answering his iPhone" if written in 2014.

The poem takes a turn here -- "Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!" Wordsworth turns his posey-scope on human beings. "Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife," he laments, we are no simple birds, yet, "voices of two different Natures." But, as the Cuckoo's got its song reverberating back to itself, human beings have a kind of boomerang-consciousness as well.

"Have we not too," Wordsworth asks, an echoed song? "Yes we have." Yet, our echoes come not in song, but in the form of Answers. "Echoes from beyond the grave," Wordsworth writes. And this voice comes from within ourselves: "Such within ourselves we hear / Oft-times, ours though sent from afar; / Listen, ponder, hold them dear, / For of God, of God they are!"

It's a strong, God-waving finish -- and one I actually agree with. If we turn into ourselves, look deeply in our intellect, our heart, and our consciousness, the answers to our most existentially-debilitating questions are revealed. So, like a Cuckoo, I'm off to sit in meditation and listen for the All-Knowing Voice.

Yes! full surely 'twas the Echo,

Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to Thee, shouting Cuckoo!
Giving to thee Sound for Sound.

Whence the Voice? from air or earth?
This the Cuckoo cannot tell;
But a startling sound had birth,
As the Bird must know full well;

Like the voice through earth and sky
By the restless Cuckoo sent;
Like her ordinary cry,
Like—but oh how different!

Hears not also mortal Life?
Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife,
Voices of two different Natures?

Have not We too? Yes we have
Answers, and we know not whence;
Echoes from beyond the grave,
Recogniz'd intelligence?

Such within ourselves we hear
Oft-times, ours though sent from far;
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God, of God they are!