Modern American Poetry

(^338) Katherine Kearns
have to be “crushed like some wild / Easily shattered rose” so that the
goldenrod may prevail: the petaled interiority of the rose—the vulnerable
lyricism of the birds—does not have to be shattered by the wind and rain,
which is here transformed to mist. The nymphs are incarnations of water,
flowers, and birds, their trailing garments, the clinging mist, and their voices
becoming petals, bird song, and the odor of flowers all intertwined. They
teach the young speaker lessons that, in Frost’s later poetry, are obscured by
the Oven Bird’s insistence that one must know “in singing not to sing,” must
know that the pure, undisguised lyric voice has nothing to say in a fallen,
diminished world:
And thus it is I know so well
Why the flower has odor, the bird has song.
You have only to ask me, and I can tell.
No, not vainly there did I dwell,
Nor vainly listen all the night long.
This speaker, young and receptive, predicts the duality of Frost’s later
speakers who can only hear human woe in birds’ voices and who can use
flowers only as metaphors for something else. Perceived even here as
knowledge natural only to females, the maiden’s secrets are yet gladly heard
through a window left open to receive them. Unlike Frost’s human women,
who look out of windows and seek to escape, these nymphs come freely each
night to salve the speaker’s loneliness, and unlike the men who, like the
husband of “Home Burial,” “think the talk is all,” this speaker is still
receptive and can hear them. These voices, projections of a “female” self
whose knowledge is not rational because it prefigures cause and effect, are
benign and lovely. They are like the beautiful Lady North Wind of Frost’s
favorite childhood book, At the Back of the North Wind,as they teach him
mysteries. And he, the poet-speaker, is the translator who puts mystery into
words. He senses at once both an innocent locus of nonwords, where
maidens embody flowers, dew, birds, mist, and darkness because they come
from a place that is prenatal, and the erotic (fallen, guilt- and ecstasy-
producing) world of names, where the ineffable emanates from the flowers
called as odor and from the birds called as song.
The maidens of “In a Vale” are like the nymph in “Paul’s Wife,”
who, delivered from her tree as a length of dry pith, rises from the water, her
hair a wet helmet, and walks into the woods with Paul, enraptured, following.
She goes out like a firefly when she is seen by other men, vaporized by
perceptions that extinguish her unnamable state. Paul is left to be driven