Rhapsody on a Windy Night explores the moonlight on the streets, rendering everything vague, including the speaker’s memories. Streetlamps, in particular, seem to emit sound as well as light, and the abstract’midnight’ seems to have its own agency. It shakes the speaker’s memory like a madman shaking flowers. This is the essence and purpose of the speaker’s poetry, which examines human discontent.
This poem imagines how an old farm laborer would remember the speaker after his death. If he had been gone one morning, he would have noticed that he had not returned home. A day later, the “kindred Spirit” might ask him about his death, and he might reply that the speaker often wandered the countryside at dawn. In fact, he was probably out all night, as he says here. He would then sit under an old tree to gaze at the brook at noon.
0