Soundings for Home 191When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with,
I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of
my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating
sound, stirring them up as the keeper of the menagerie his wild
beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside
(“The Ponds”).But Thoreau, famously, was not looking for someone else additional to
him; far from being worried that he “kept the universe alone” he seemed
quite happy to be “the keeper of a menagerie” of wild beasts. The man in the
poem is not so lucky—or so superficial. He wants more, the “most,” but his
gesture to the universe does not close even around a person. Rather, we are
left with the possibility that the gesture remains open, unless it closes, self-
protectively, before an image of vastation or of animal necessity which
admits, as the repeated use of the word “and” in the last three lines suggests,
of no subordination or modification or taming. This “embodiment” could be
in no one’s menagerie.
One further way of allowing the poem its proper resonance is to read
it as part of the sequence of three poems in which Frost placed it in A Witness
Tree.It appears first, followed by “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the
Same” and then by “The Subverted Flower.” All three suggest, as indeed do
Frost’s earliest love poems in A Boy’s Will,that consciousness is determined
in part by the way one “reads” the response of nature to human sound. By
placing “Never Again Would Birds’ Song be the Same” between “The Most
of It” and “The Subverted Flower,” Frost once again reveals his deep
commitment to married love as a precondition for discovering human
“embodiments” in nature, for discovering Adam and Eve, whose intercourse
included the “call or laughter” that was “carried aloft” where ever since it has
been “crossed” with the song of birds:
He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words. 5
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed 10