Modern American Poetry

Soundings for Home 193

to John Bartlett: “A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called
words may be strung.” And a bit later he insists that “the ear is the only true
writer and the only true reader ... remember that the sentence sound often
says more than the words” (Thompson, Letters,pp. 111, 113).
“Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” is quite properly
located between two poems in which human sound fails in an attempted
transaction with nature. It is as if the young man and the woman of “The
Subverted Flower,” the last of the three poems, were in a post-lapsarian
world where flowers and sex have the power to transform them into beasts,
while the man alone in “The Most of It” is in the world without an Eve of
any kind, and where the only form of animal life which can be heard, seen,
or imagined in response to a cry of loneliness is so alien as to be called “it.”
In both poems the world is devoid of love, and consequently, as Frost would
have it, of the power to realize a human extension, “someone else additional
to him,” a metaphor, like Adam and Eve, that would augment the human
animal and allow it to make a human “home.” These three great poems are
profoundly about finding a “home” in the largest sense—by propagating the
self through love, through the metaphorical discovery of self in another. “You
must have read the famous valentine / Pericles sent Aspasia in absentia,”
Frost writes at the end of the late poem (1951) “How Hard It Is to Keep from
Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” And he then gives his
version of the valentine:

For God himself the height of feeling free

Must have been His success in simile

When at sight of you He thought of me.

Simile or metaphor is the act of love, the act of writing poetry, and also
evidence in each of these of how something as frighteningly big and
potentially chaotic as the “universe” can be “kept” to a human measure. In
the disproportion between these two words, “universe” and “kept,” is both
the pathos of “The Most of It” and a clue to Frost’s sense that his own
personal and poetic salvation lay in facing up to the full cost, in poetry and
in daily living, of the metaphors he makes. “Earth’s the right place for love,”
we are told in “Birches,” and while there are times when the speaker of that
poem would “like to get away from earth awhile,” his aspiration for escape to
something “larger” is safely controlled by the recognition that birch trees
will only bear so much climbing before returning you, under the pressure of
human weight, back home.