Modern American Poetry

(^316) Katherine Kearns
who might be expected to hear a wilder, more natural song, imposes upon
them a sad domestic metaphor, believing them to “fill their breasts” selfishly
only with thoughts for their mates, themselves, and “their built or driven
nests.” When Frost’s birds sing, they are perceived to sing in a minor key—
minor in its sense of lesser significance as much as in its musical sense; in “A
Minor Bird,” the speaker wants to banish the song whose tones must reflect
(with myna-bird precision, if the title is any evidence) his own melancholy,
self-blaming tune.
As personifications of the compromised poetic voice—the pinioned
soul—these birds as often speak as sing, and they are used to call the speakers
to account for their own mundane lives. They give them, as in “A Nature
Note,” “a piece of their bills.” The double pun here suggests a thoroughly
antiromantic vision: they are like the merchant from Porlock come to dun
the dreaming Coleridge. The “note” is less musical than promissory (they
sing “All out of time pell-mell!”), and the phrase “piece of their bills”
suggests a cacophony of images and linguistic turns: the bill of a bird and the
bill owed, the implied phrase “I’ll give him a piece of my mind” connoting
an angry speech but used synecdochally to suggest a language that comes
from the mouth but not from the head. In other poems the birds are more
quietly rational than the whippoorwills of “A Nature Note,” but the message
remains essentially unheroic: in “The Last Word of the Bluebird” the
bluebird “sends word” through three parties that “The North wind last night
/ Almost made him cough his tailfeathers off.”^5 The symbol of transcendence
over despair has a bad cold, word of which is carried by a quiet but unmusical
crow (who says, “Oh, / I was looking for you. / How do you do?”) to the
equally phlegmatic speaker who recounts the interchange. In “Our Singing
Strength” the birds are reduced to “a talking twitter.” More like cows than
birds, they are herded on the road by the “Drover” / speaker, who, it may be
assumed, has a song that is equally hemmed in and bound down (the birds
can’t leave the snowless roads for the snowfields, and they cannot fly upward
into the “too much carven marble hall” of the trees). The speaker’s voice
manifests itself in matter-of-fact couplets; he drives the talking twitter down
the page as he moves the birds down the road. By implication the combined
mass of thrushes, bluebirds, blackbirds, sparrows, and robins might represent
enough “singing strength” to bring spring out of winter if they could raise
their voices above a nervous twitter. But when the spring snowfall melts, this
potentially explosive chorus will immediately disperse—“Really a very few
[come] to build and stay”—leaving the song unsung.
And just as Frost’s lyric birds are burdened, weary creatures, so too do
his speakers frequently and explicitly claim for themselves a noninspirational