Modern American Poetry

(^314) Katherine Kearns
his dualism its dubious palliative of self-referential irony. The lyric birds and
the weary speakers tell us the genuine Frostian wisdom of achieving a
commonsensical accommodation with the fallen world, while inciting at
another, and ineffable, level a profound disquiet.
His virile prosody does not, then, merely supersede what Frost has to
say about the necessary failure of lyricism when language fails to hold
meaning. As if there were not this contradictory prosodic claim to an ironic
distance from the problem that must plague lesser men, one must consider
Frost’s apparently genuine sense of his own lyric dilemma. Given his typical
bifurcation between a gravity-bound voice and the ludicrous, gaseous
immensities of speculative and traditionally “poetic” language, one must ask
where the possibilities for lyricism lie. Where would an ascending bird fly to
in the frangible dome that is Frost’s vision of the arced sky; can it escape to
sing hymns at heaven’s gate like Shakespeare’s lark or to rise like a cloud of
fire or an unembodied joy into Heaven like Shelley’s? The “dome”
represents both form and necessary containment, so that the Oven Bird’s arc
of mud and sticks suggests its rounded view, while space is, and is a
correlative for, formlessness. Thus “as a little bird / Before the mystery of
glass” are these enclosed creatures under the sky. Earth may be a diminished
place where everything is metamorphically inclined, but it is the only
alternative to the void, where the only names are empty. Inside this dome the
birds may not soar very high, but neither will they become distended, their
songs “agape.” To project a bird into the heavens is to imply that it is divinely
inspired, that it may reach an ecstasy so close to celestial that it is posed at
the gateway to God. But Frost’s birds carry the weighty oversound of Eve’s
“daylong” fallen voice, “her voice upon their voices crossed,” so that “Never
again would birds’ song be the same” as before God introduced woman into
the garden.^3 Other lyric birds than Frost’s may verify sensually a world
outside of self, their songs evidence of some inhumanly orchestrated
harmony or some divinely ordained artistry, but it is as if this function wanes
inevitably in Frost’s poetry with the suspicion that there is no truth outside
of one’s own capacity to make some (perhaps arbitrary) sound of sense and
some sense of sound. The “Sunset Bird” sang “with an angelic gift” in a
season long past, but in Frost’s silent winter landscape the place where the
bird once sang “sweet and swift” is empty, and silence prevails.
In fact, only when the flood is an external phenomenon rather than the
internal surge of blood in the body documented in “The Flood” may the
dove leave the ark and return with an olive branch as proof of another land
that is not submerged. Birds are traditionally messengers carrying
otherworldly news, harbingers whose very existence in a given time and place