Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 313imperatives of fall. Loud, he predicts the inevitable, and his “language”
reflects the potential meaninglessness of a world in which one is forced to
define a thing by what it departs from or approaches rather than what it “is.”
To anticipate and recognize in the full-blown flower only its inevitable decay
is to miss the mark, but to ignore its ephemerality is an equal failure. The
paradox of the Oven Bird’s assertive voice completes the suggestion that only
a new “language” can accommodate the diminishing of things, for he neither
sings nor speaks: he “knows in singing not to sing” and he frames his
question “in all but words.” He neither sinks nor soars, and he lives in a solid,
domed house that typifies his Yankee ingenuity, his forethought, his
prudence. In a voice of virile moderation, loud but unhysterical, he sets out
to articulate his surroundings.
But at the same time,and in a way that refuses to cancel out this
message, Frost obliquely mocks his meager lyric birds and the compromised,
oven-bird speakers throughout his poetry who are equally pinioned, held by
their own voices from transcendence. He is ironically and ambivalently
aware of the Palgravian definition of “lyric poetry.” (Lentricchia sums it up:
“No narrative allowed, no description of local reference, no didacticism, no
personal, occasional, or religious material, no humor—the very antithesis of
the ‘poetical’—no dramatic textures of blank verse because the speaking
voice is alien to song lyric,” etc.)^1 And Frost is very much dedicated to
deconstructing this mode with his own lyricism: he writes to Amy Lowell:
“The great thing is that you and some of the rest of us have landed with both
feet on all the little chipping poetry of a while ago. We have busted ’em up
as with cavalry. We have, we have, we have.”^2 Yet paradoxically, Frost holds
on to lyric power by seeming to abnegate it: there is in this erotically
declined game of loving (an abased and abasing) language an element of what
can only be called sadomasochism. If poetry takes “a little rough handling
once in a while,” Frost is willing to “do it violence” in order to maintain his
own poetic potency (Letters182); yet he is both the abased—with his words—
and the abaser—with his prosodically virile sound. Like ice shrieking across
a red-hot griddle, his poetry does, indeed, ride on its own melting. One
cannot, and Frost has ensured this absolutely with his unstable irony, make a
validated choice between the fire and the ice, or between the language, so
insistently mundane, and the potent oversound. Fire and ice are, after all, the
inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision: that endlessly
regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the
productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic
vocation and the state to which poetry—and if poetry then all language—has
come. Frost anticipates modernism’s lament and, it may be said, prefigures in