The Hills of Youth by Alfred Noyes

The Hills of Youth
by Alfred Noyes
Once, on the far blue hills,
Alone with the pine and the cloud, in those high still places;
Alone with a whisper of ferns and a chuckle of rills,
And the peat-brown pools that mirrored the angels’ faces,
Pools that mirrored the wood-pigeon’s grey-blue feather,
And all my thistledown dreams as they drifted along;
Once, oh, once, on the hills, thro’ the red-bloomed heather
I followed an elfin song.
Once, by the wellsprings of joy,
In the glens of the hart’s-tongue fern, where the brooks came leaping
Over the rocks, like a scrambling bare-foot boy
That never had heard of a world grown old with weeping;
Once, thro’ the golden gorse (do the echoes linger
In Paradise woods, where the foam of the may runs wild?)
I followed the flute of a light-foot elfin singer,
A god with the eyes of a child.
Once, he sang to me there,
From a crag on a thyme-clad height where the dew still glistened;
He sang like the spirit of Spring in that dawn-flushed air,
While the angels opened their doors and the whole sky listened:
He sang like the soul of a rainbow, if heaven could hear it,
Beating to heaven, on wings that were April’s own;
A song too happy and brave for the heart to bear it,
Had the heart of the hearer known.
Once, ah, once, no more,
The hush and the rapture of youth in those holy places,
The stainless height, the hearts that sing and adore
Till the sky breaks out into flower with the angels’ faces!
Once, in the dawn, they were mine; but the noon bereft me.
At midnight now, in an ebb of the loud world’s roar,
I catch but a broken stave of the songs that left me
On hills that are mine no more.

http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177034

When he mentions the words “once” and “far” and “blue”; one tends to think of a color heavenly blue which leads to the thought of an unreachable paradise. IN these hills, I imagine myself at peace with only the pine, clouds, fern, and rills as companions. The “s” sounds in “whisper…ferns…rills” make me hear the stream and the wind flow by me. I find myself following with him through wildness to search for that song. And by the length of his description of his observations , I feel as if I have walked a lot in order to just follow this “elfin” song. IN the second stanza, The word “scrambling” is a word full of consonants that it makes the word dance in your mouth. This is a parallel to the hyperness and energy the barefooted boy is full of. One imagines the woods as a place without proportion and this is how the poet portrays it to the readers visual mind- “where the foam of the may runs wild”. One imagines foams of flowers sprouting up wherever they please through that one line of his. The elfin singer now has more of a “face” to the reader- “a god with the eyes of a child” and “light-foot”- this reminds me of the messenger god of the Greeks. This one line gives a face to the faceless creation of the elfin singer. In the third stanza, the dew is the sparkling point that shines in my mind due to the word “glistened”. It is this word that sparks up the entire image of the elfin singer singing with fresh dew by his side in the early lights of the morning. The reader just fills in the rest of the visual picture with his own imagination like I just did. When the poet starts describing from that specific standpoint of the singer to the rest of the world surrounding him listening to him, I see the image expanding in my mind. This is a technique that makes the readers mind expand and imagine and explore the poets created world. The last stanza has a feeling of sense of loss and depravity of this fun that used to be. His overwhelm with this youth he once held in conjunction with the flowers, sky, and angels is “no more”. From the words “dawn” until “midnight” I visualize a whole day pass without any singing and “following” as before. Only those two words were needed for the reader to just fill the rest of the images in his head just like I did. The word “now” makes me hear the “now” of “broken stave of the songs”. It is known that the hills and the youthful exploration once held through it is gone.