In the second, equanimity is restored, and the meditation centres on the idea that, if he were cured, he would “leave the little speckled folk / Their happy life — their marvellous command / Of stream’s wild ways.” While “little speckled folk” is almost childish, the image of the “marvellous command / Of stream’s wild ways” is redeemingly fine, giving renewed physicality to the narrator’s remembrance of his own human body when it seemed to share the trout’s “marvellous command”.
Diving down to the river-bed, the poet feels its surface for gems, “until the bold hands meet/ In depths of beryl what the trick’d eyes crave.” Beryl (“precious blue-green color-of-sea-water stone” as Wiki translates the classical Greek) is a mineral which includes precious stones, such as emerald.
River Babble belongs to the first of the five sections, A Wheeled Bed, voicing the frustration and time-heavy boredom of a once active and ambitious young man confined to what he addresses elsewhere as “hybrid of rock and of Procrustes’ bed, / Thou thing of wood, of leather and of steel…”.
The “dark, deep emerald” of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting The Day Dream might be relevant to What the Sonnet Is, and, possibly, in River Babble II, it’s Rossetti’s genius-guaranteed immortality that’s encoded in the wishful dive for the beryl.
The writing in the first sonnet is at its most vivid when it observes ordinary things: fragments of torn paper, the “leap[ing] from stone to stone”, the water “humming” at dusk with insect life.
