"Dejection" begins with a cry. "Well!" the speaker starts, and as the poem develops, it's hard to tell whether his outburst is excited, resigned, thoughtful, or some strange combination of all those feelings.
But one thing the speaker's informal "Well!" makes clear is that this will be an intimate poem. Grand epics don't start with an everyday "Well!": they kick off with a "Sing, o Muse" or a "Hwaet!" Already, readers can feel that this ode will bring them right up close to the speaker and his inner life.
Here at the beginning, the speaker is indeed doing something pretty everyday: looking out his window at a "tranquil" night, an evening stirred by breezes that, sculptor-like, "mould" the clouds into "lazy flakes." But all that calm, this speaker believes, is only the prelude to a storm—a personified wind who, the speaker says with a touch of ominous understatement, "pl[ies] a busier trade" than gentle cloud-moulding.
He guesses that a storm is coming, not because he's reading a barometer, but because he's familiar with a "grand old ballad": the ancient Scottish tale of Sir Patrick Spence, an unfortunate (and incompetent) sea captain. Lines from that ballad form the poem's epigraph—lines in which a sailor warns Sir Patrick of disaster. The sight of the "new Moon" holding the "old Moon in her arms," the sailor says, threatens a "deadly storm."
The speaker of "Dejection," it seems, is a person who lives more in the world of old songs than the world of weather reports. And perhaps he's also a person who sees nature as a dangerous, magical place. The eerie image of the new moon cradling the old is easier to imagine as a personification than a description of a natural phenomenon: it might take readers a moment to grasp that what the speaker is literally seeing above him is a crescent moon that still shows the outlines of the full moon.
In just a few lines, then, the reader knows this much:
- This will be a poem told from the intimate, up-close perspective of its speaker.
- That speaker is a person who sees the natural world in terms of stories and visions, imbuing nature with a personality.
- And, if the old anonymous "Bard" who wrote "Sir Patrick Spence" was indeed "weather-wise," there's a storm coming.