Modern American Poetry

(^312) Katherine Kearns
treacherously, to be flown against after sundown. Ousted from their safe
perches in “The Thatch,” the birds “must brood where they [fall] in mulch
and mire, / Trusting feathers and inward fire / Till daylight [makes] it safe for
a flyer.” Trapped by a spring snow in “Our Singing Strength,” they sit
huddled and vulnerable on the muddy road where the speaker drives them
“underfoot in bits of flight.” In “A Line-Storm Song,” caught in “the wood-
world’s torn despair,” their songs are “crushed like some / Wild, easily
shattered rose.” The cautious, small bird of “The Woodpile” is silent and
fearful; he will “say no word to tell ... who he [is],” and his “little fear” makes
his evasive movements erratic and small. These birds that do not fly, that
secret themselves in the evening forest in “Come In” to call the speaker to
“come in / To the dark and lament,” seem defeated or resigned, tethered to
the ground. In “Acceptance” the mated birds are forlorn creatures separated
by night; the female closes a “faded eye” and the lost male is a “waif.” In
“The Exposed Nest” baby birds lay revealed and vulnerable, their nest torn
by the plow blade; the speaker imagines that they will die before they fledge,
abandoned by parents too fearful to return to them. Like the infant son in
“Home Burial,” these nestlings will return to the ground, which is plowed
and open to receive them. No blithe spirits, Frost’s birds never rain pure
melody down from the sky.
These seemingly negligible birds, symbols of the lyric voice, have
intuited the Oven Bird’s lesson and are the signs by which one is meant to
divine Frost’s acceptance of the linguistic implications of the fall from
innocence. The Oven Bird, who watching “That other fall we name the fall”
come to cover the world with dust, “Knows in singing not to sing.” Instead,
“The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a
diminished thing.” The fall, in necessitating both birth and death, imposes a
continuum of identity that compromises naming. The process toward death,
begun with birth, transmutes and gradually diminishes form, thus adding to
the equation—words are things before they become words and things again
when they do—an element of inevitable, perpetual senescence. The birds of
“A Winter Eden” say “which buds are leaf and which are bloom,” but the
names are always premature or too late: gold goes to green, dawn to day,
everything rises and falls and is transformed. Thus the Oven Bird says,
“Midsummer is to spring as one to ten,” because a season—this or any
other—may only be codified analogously. “Fall” takes on a series of
identities: petal fall, the fall season, the first and fortunate fall, each of which
bears, at the moment of articulation, the burden of a whole complex of
moral, aesthetic, and literary valuations. This bird is a “midsummer and a
midwood bird” that sees things at the moment of capitulation to the