Modern American Poetry

(^326) Katherine Kearns
Ironically perceived, the poem could in fact be read as a veiled insult to
another, unnamed poet making his poetic presence unendurable with its
interminable, minor-keyed warble; there are, as “The Lesson for Today”
makes clear, more than enough poets moaning about what is out of joint in
the world to fit this bill (ll. 30–5).
But taken as serious, “A Minor Bird” has a remarkably resonant
simplicity, as it suggests an intimate contiguity between speaker and bird,
both of whom are masterfully represented in language reflective of the
colorless nonspecifities of depression. “I have wished a bird would fly away,”
the speaker says, “And not sing by my house all day.” In this opening one
intuits the repetitive nature of his wish, and in the non-specificity of “a bird”
one understands that allbirds may sound to him the way this one does. The
sad voice cannot muster the energy or will to extend himself to ten syllables;
he cannot rouse himself from monosyllables (four two-syllable words out of
sixty-six). The unexpected hand clapping of the second couplet—the only
image of movement—is balanced by the admission that “it seemed as if I
could bear no more.” The third couplet is richly ambiguous, as the situation
is perceived in terms of “fault” and “guilt,” and the bird and speaker are
conflated into correlatives of each other. At one level, the “fault”—the
melancholy reaction awakened by the bird’s song—is partly in the speaker,
whose own hearing of the bird is, he feels, irrationally judgmental: one
cannot blame a bird for singing its “little inborn tune” (“On a Bird Singing
in Its Sleep”). At another level, this one reinforced by the punning title
whereby the (mynah) bird mimics the speaker, it is the speaker interpreting
the song who creates / causes the minor key: “a bird” or any bird would
sound the same. Like one unable to imagine that the phoebes don’t weep, he
makes weeping where there may be none. In short, the speaker reveals
himself as the minor bird, and the poet by his precisely appropriate form
confirms him as the minor bird while confirming his own transcendent song.
Plagued by what he senses to be his own serious limitation—there is
“something wrong” with him for wanting to silence any song—he sings the
very monotonal, abbreviated song that most aptly declares his own depressed
state. By the logic of this poem, to silence the bird’s song would be to silence
himself.
As lyricists, Frost’s speakers are such mynah birds as the self-revelatory
figure of “A Minor Bird” who is made to perform the poet’s service almost
ventriloquistically. Because they talk they guarantee their own
deconstruction: again, those sacrificial actors at their play.^20 This dynamic
reiterates the essential mandate of the manly struggle for self-containment
and self-control, for the man of moderation, the good Greek, is a man of