Modern American Poetry

(^192) Richard Poirier
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
Nothing in Frost more beautifully exemplifies the degree to which
“tone of meaning” or sounds of voice create resemblances between birds and
Eve, between our first parents and us, between the unfallen and the fallen
world. On such resemblances as these Frost would have us imagine a
habitable world and a human history. This is a poem which establishes
differentiations only that it may then blur them. The delicate hint of a
possible but very light sarcasm in the first line blends into but is not wholly
dissipated by a concessive “admittedly” in the sixth line. This is one man
allowing for another’s pride of love but unable to resist the suggestion that
perhaps his friend is a bit overindulgent. And the other concessive phrasings,
“Be that as may be” and “Moreover,” are equally delicate in their
effectiveness. For one thing, they tend to take the sting out of the possibly
ironic statement that the eloquence of Eve “could only have had an influence
on birds”; for another, they lighten the force of “persisted”; and they allow
for an almost unnoticeable transition by which the reader is moved from the
“garden round” of the second line to “the woods” in line 11.
The tone of the poem is of a speaker who is now here with us and of
our time and destiny, while it is at the same time full of a nice camaraderie
with our first parents. It is loving and responsible all at once, accepting the
parentage of Adam and Eve and the necessary consequences of the Fall,
along with the acknowledgment of the possibly good fortunes that also
attended it. Eve did come—from Adam and with Adam—in order that the
song of birds should, by being changed, meanmore than it otherwise would
have. The force of the word “aloft” is ever so discreetly crucial here. Her
eloquence had power not indiscriminately but only when it was carried to a
“loftiness” that belongs to great love and great poetry, neither of which need
be separated from the delights of “call or laughter.” The “voice upon their
voices crossed” became part of Emerson’s fossil poetry, awaiting discovery by
future readers, and lovers. The ability to hear the “daylong” voice of Eve in
bird song teaches us that our own voices, like the voice in this poem, still
carry something of our first parents and their difficult history. Mythological
identification in this poem consists of voices finding a way to acknowledge
and also to transcend historical differences and historical catastrophes. The
birds’ oversound in relation to words resembles the “sentence sounds”
described in the letter, already quoted, which Frost wrote in February 1914