"It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries"

A single sensory ribbon unfurls: warmth against the skin, movement from the Atlantic, sound threaded through the air. The west wind in English lore is the kindly one, bringing soft weather and rain that wakes fields and hedgerows. Naming it “warm” sets a season, spring or early summer, when life loosens and color returns. Yet that warmth is not silent; it is “full of birds’ cries,” a sky busy with swifts and gulls and hedge-singers, a vibrant, half-wild chorus that signals both abundance and restlessness.

The line makes the wind a messenger. It carries voices from elsewhere, the lanes and orchards, the sea-cliffs, the marsh, so that hearing it is also hearing home. Sound travels with air, and memory travels with sound; a cry overhead unlocks fields of recollection. For a poet long associated with the sea and with wandering, the west wind suggests a turning back toward familiar shores, a compass point that points inward as well as westward.

Its music is ambivalent. Birds’ cries are joyous and raucous, but also sharp, even plaintive; they can suggest freedom in motion and an ache for nesting. The phrase “full of” implies more than a casual scattering of notes; the wind is saturated, almost burdened, with voices, as if nature were trying to speak in excess to a listening heart. That abundance can console and overwhelm at once.

Sound and structure deepen the effect: the soft repetition of w, warm, wind, west, blows through the line like breath, the commas pacing a gentle gust, and the final image opening into a wide, acoustic sky. The wind becomes not just weather but presence: a living current that stirs the skin, awakens the countryside, and summons the tender ache of belonging. Warmth comforts; the cries remind that all life is moving, migrating, returning, homeward and onward in the same breath.