Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 325of irony or other rhetorical strategies is a form of unmanning, a masochism
that brings one, as in “The Fear of Man,” to the desire for and fear of
violation. On the other hand, to seem not to love, not to yield to the
eroticism of a language that simultaneously unveils and regenerates this
potent erotic source is also to invite impotence.
The (unreachable) ideal of lyric is to communicate feeling in its
immediacy, but that failing, one must work to imply that there is a site of
bliss, interdicted but imminent. That originally the form was indissociable
from the lyre and the dance suggests its physical orientation and its proximity
to a kind of possession. The lyric bird as it is romantically declined
recapitulates in small these elements of musicality and dancing: “pant[ing]
forth a flood of rapture so divine,” Shelley’s skylark springs from the earth,
soars, floats, and runs, and it is its ability to articulate itself through
unfettered movement as well as sound that both separates it from and joins
it with the word-bound but participatory lyric poet. Ideally, then, the poem
is,as Frost would have it, the same as love—an ecstatic song that, internalized
in the movements of desire, approximates the dance in its power to alter
stasis to ecstasy. Yet Frost chooses such birds as know not to fly too high or
to sing too long, their “inspiration” lying in the “inspiration to desist” from
singing before hostile ears might track them down (“On a Bird Singing in Its
Sleep”). Described as “loveless” in “A Winter Eden,” they deny their own
lyric symbolism, and given in “Acceptance” a “faded eye,” they abrogate
their lyric vision for a diminished view. And yet in acknowledging that the
speaking voice is its own source of impotence Frost empowers his own
metalyrical sound.
There is, then, an inescapable discrepancy to be accounted for in this
nearly absurdist reification of the lyric poet as oven bird: Frost’s poetry itself
is notmundane, despite frequent pretenses to the contrary. It is the speaking
voice that tends to be mundane or preoccupied with life’s daily insults. Those
figures who embody themselves in the “I” that looks like Frost but, by virtue
of Frost’s ironic habits, can never quite beFrost show a consistent pattern of
graceless attributes from self-aggrandizement to self-belittlement while the
poetry prevails over their revealed weaknesses. Frost articulates this very
disjunction in “A Minor Bird,” which suggests the intimate connections and
the asserted disparities among the singing bird, the speaking voice, and the
poet. The poet denigrates the bird as “minor,” and he displays the subject in
predominately nine-syllable lines deployed in rhymed couplets. The poem,
in fact, looks quite minor, its simplicity of form and its brevity proclaiming a
kind of intended deflation of the lyric mode: this is not, despite its “Ode to a
Nightingale” allusion, an ode, nor, the poet implies, does it deserve to be.