Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away.

The image likens brief lyrical outbursts to swallows’ quick, darting flights: songs that appear suddenly, touch sorrow (“dip / Their wings in tears”), and vanish. It suggests a poetics of transience—emotion rises into art only momentarily before it escapes, leaving the speaker with the aftertaste of grief. The metaphor also implies restraint: the song does not linger to explain itself; it merely skims the surface of feeling. In this way, the lines capture how elegiac or melancholic inspiration can come in flashes—beautiful, swift, and inseparable from pain.