There is something beautiful about a simple person whose voice echoes throughout the valley where she works. This is the image Wordsworth gives the reader in the first stanza of this poem. Even though the poet claims the song the girl sings is a "melancholy strain" (6), he also compares her song to a Nightingale (9) and a Cuckoo-bird (14) and claims her song is more beautiful than either. The speaker does not actually know the words that the young girl speaks, and wonders if it is "the plaintive numbers.../ For old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago" (18-20), but her song stays with him even as he climbs the hill away from the valley and leaves. Perhaps what keeps that song in his heart is the fact that it is a song that speaks to all humans, as all have experienced "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again" (23-24).
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