Modern American Poetry

(^322) Katherine Kearns
tree becomes insubstantial as it is made an external referent for the speaker:
the tree outside his bedroom, made vague and diffuse as a cloud, does not
toss down oracular leaves: “Not all your light tongues talking aloud / Could
be profound,” the speaker says. This tree, gossipy, familiar, is not engaged in
a dialogue with the wind but is instead “taken and tossed” by it just as the
speaker’s dreams cause him to be “taken and swept / And all but lost.” Both
the man and the tree are in danger of being deprived of meaningful speech
by too-powerful “weather,” for just as the tree’s leaves, its “light tongues,”
can only babble, so too can the man only dream, wordless, of chaos. The one
a “fated” correlative for the other, they are both reduced to the status of
victims: “The day she put our heads together, / Fate had her imagination
about her, / Your head so much concerned with outer, / Mine with inner,
weather.”
And so what with all these symbolically pinioned birds and these self-
deprecating, depressed speakers wary of inspirative power, it begins to seem
that the sound of sense Frost aims for is exactly the down-home,
conversational, and aphoristic “wisdom” of the Oven Bird. It seems that he
really might have been shocked by Lionel Trilling’s birthday compliment,
that instead of desiring that Sophoclean capacity to terrify he might indeed
rather wish to think that he lives “in the middle” at variance with no one and
nothing.^13 Yet so laid out before us, this New Englander’s version of the
compromised lyric voice seems too patently symbolic and too
straightforward in its message for one so ironically inclined as Frost. And in
fact it may be said that Frost’s modest and unaspiring birds and his wind-
wary speakers and his battered flowers are decoys, the lyric sacrifices that
“keep the overcurious out of the secret places” of his mind while freeing a
metalyrical power that may not be fully articulated in any way the world
knows how to speak (Letters385).^14 As Poirier points out, Frost, all too wary
of the “egotistical sublime,” could not, nonetheless, completely give it up;
the schizoid split between neoclassical reserve and visionary intensity that
makes him so fond of mad Kit Smart is potential in his own devices of
disguise and control.^15 If his lover’s skeleton in “The Witch of Coös” is a
veritable chandelier of consciously reticulated symbolisms constructed to
aggrandize and undercut simultaneously love’s body, his lyric symbols are
another such wily, eccentric device.
Frost’s birds beg to be taken at their word when they sing a
commonsensical message of compromise—the Oven Bird is such a fruitful
symbol as regards Frost’s masculinist, deep-voiced rigor—and his dispirited
speakers really do seem to argue against the sublime. But the full poetic song
does not completely sanction their limited view. The birds demand in their