Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 315is a portent. As such, they become inviting embodiments for the Platonic
soul, which may transcend visceral and appetitive apprehensions of reality to
discover, and to sing, some alternative vision.^4 But even Frost’s songbirds are
bound to the standard metaphors from their literary pasts: in “The Valley’s
Singing Day,” they sing “pearly-pearly,” which the speaker translates into
cliché: “(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early, / Before it changes
to diamonds in the sun.)” (Like the songbirds, this speaker is a somewhat
indifferent poet.) What the birds say here—or more to the point, what they
are heard to say—represents an economic vision disguised as an aesthetic
one, since pearls and diamonds maintain a precarious literary status only by
virtue of their monetary worth. Like the birds, the metaphors are fallen, their
“beauty” dependent on their post-Edenic market value and the hearer’s
recognition and admiration of them as a mark of exchange. Birds are a
perfect paradox of connectedness and free flight, for they cannot remain on
the wing forever, and where they touch down must exist sensually— whether
it is heaven’s gate, a golden bough, or an olive tree. To divest them of this
capacity for translation, to tether them to low bushes, eaves, and roadbeds,
to place worn-out lyric clichés in their weary beaks is to render them more
human than otherwise.
Frost’s birds, so often personified as defeated humans, are measured
almost solely by their silence or by their voices, which are inevitably
perceived as uttering some sad or aggrieved human message that seems to
urge one to lamentation. It takes an enormous effort of will not to
superimpose Eve’s voice; as “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”
points out, the burned farmhouse and the abandoned barn are in reality only
sorrowful to human eyes, but even to one who understands country things it
is still almost impossible “Not to believe the phoebes wept.” And Frost
himself does not pretend to hear in this intimate country the unhumanized,
nonpersonified sounds of nature: His birds are self-consciously literary
creations, burdened with postlapsarian knowledge, correlatives for the
saddened and diminished voices of people bereft of human love. Birds may
not actually weep at human tragedy and despair, but to hear anything else in
their voices is, for Frost’s speakers, nearly impossible. The solemn speaker of
“A Late Walk” who sees in his autumnal landscape all the signs of
bereavement and death—the “headless aftermath of mowing,” the bare
trees—feels that “The whir of sober birds / Up from the tangle of withered
weeds / Is sadder than any words.” The “hill wife,” who ultimately is herself
subsumed into the natural world, knows that the birds she waits so eagerly to
hear are preoccupied “But with each other and themselves,” and she does not
pretend to translate “whatever it is they sing” to each other. But even she,