Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 333toward resolution. The movement is toward isolation rather than away from
it, so that the discrete formal continuity of a given poem is the necessary cage
for an autonomous internal conflict. The birds give a very limited,
opinionated, prudential version of this reality which must be, to a large
extent, supplemented by the natural correlatives for passion and appetitive
uncontrol that fill the poetry. The glaring discrepancy between the
uninnocent birds who know Eve’s language and the elemental powers that
may unmake that language—between the clock-watching birds and the gaunt
beast ravaging the apple tree in “A Winter Eden”—suggests that Frost, who
sees only struggle and never resolution, engages in a dialectic in which one
impulse is the subversion of rational meaning to sound and form. This is an
active and vigorous nihilism which suggests that “meaning” is so fluid as to
be nonexistent so that arbitrarily imposed form becomes everything.
Frost’s birds are, finally, at so considerable a remove from his own
prosodic and tonal range that they may be seen less as direct symbols of his
lyric voice than as a prosopopoeia for those who speak. The speakers,
animated by Frost’s voice, share only ventriloquistically in his being, as if to
objectify the profound limitations of speech and language to communicate
the self. They are, in effect, personifications as surely as the birds are
personifications: thus the constantly shifting line between actual bird
speakers (as in “The Oven Bird”), the “speaker as bird” metaphor (as in “The
Lockless Door”), and the bird as symbol or correlative for the speaker (as in
“Our Singing Strength” or “The Thatch” or “A Minor Bird”). Words turn
men into birds—myna birds and parrots whose language is inextricably tied
more to the literary past than to the lyric self—and birds into men,
indiscriminately. The birds thus come to represent the rejection of
traditional lyricism, begun consciously for Frost after A Boy’s Will,as a mode
that, traditionally employed, was appropriate to his poetic purposes. The
Frostian overtone is wily, evasive, always potentially ironic and thus
subversive of “meaning” as it resides linguistically. Only his speakers tend
toward earnestness, toward the kind of articulated stolidity that one comes to
perceive in the birds. As embodiments of a literary tradition (only by
knowing other songs by other birds may the Oven Bird know how to frame
its own unlyrical song), they are locked into thesis or antithesis, either
transcendence or the denial of transcendence.
This disjunction between speaker and poet might suggest that Frost
consciously obfuscates a known condition or, alternatively, that he seeks to
expose an unknown and essentially unnamable condition in the nexus
between two projections of self; in either case the poem uses language against
itself in the service of some unarticulated state whose only encasement is the