Although the lattice had dropped loose, There was no wind; the heat Being so at rest that Amelotte Heard far beneath the plunge and float Of a hound swimming in the moat. Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled Home to the nests that crowned Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare Beating again, they seemed to tear With that thick caw the woof o' the air. One must have been in the tower of a castle to feel the full force of the first stanza. The two girls are in a room perhaps one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet above the water of the moat, so that except in a time of extraordinary stillness they would not hear ordinary sounds from so far below. And notice that the poet does not tell us that this was because the air did not move; he says that the heat was at rest. Very expressive--in great summer heat, without wind, the air itself seems to our senses not air but fluid heat. And the same impression of summer is given by the description of the two crows flying to their nest and back again, and screaming as they fly. The poet does not say that they flew; he says they toiled home--because flying in that thick warm air is difficult for them. When they return he uses another word, still more impressive; he says they beat again through the glare. This makes you hear the heavy motion of the wings. And he describes the crow as seeming to tear the air, because that air is so heavy that it seems like a thing woven. Here is a strangely powerful stanza describing the difficulty of speaking about a painful subject that for many years one has tried to forget: Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech, Gave her a sick recoil; As, dip thy fingers through the green That masks a pool,--where they have been The naked depth is black between. Any of you who as boys have played about a castle moat, and stirred the green water weeds covering the still water, must have remarked that the water looks black as ink underneath. Of course it is not black in itself; but the weeds keep out the sun, so that it seems black because of the shadow. The poet's comparison has a terrible exactness here. The mind is compared to stagnant water covered with water-weeds. Weeds grow upon water in this way only when there has been no wind for a long time, and no current. The condition of a mind that does not think, that dares not think, is like stagnant water in this way. Memory becomes covered up with other things, matters not relating to the past. Now we can take four stanzas from the scene of the secret family meeting, after the shame has been confessed and is known. They are very powerful. "Time crept. Upon a day at length My kinsfolk sat with me: That which they asked was bare and plain: I answered: the whole bitter strain Was again said, and heard again.