Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 327logos,competent to command, to discuss, and to persuade.^21 He does not use
the word to reveal his lyric (insecure, rhapsodic, depressed, narcissistic,
impassioned) self. And so Frost’s speakers are the (always compromised)
lyricists, while Frost himself, forever potentially ironic and always in
prosodic control, may seem the quintessential man of logos.In any event, with
others deployed to say the parts of what he feels, he remains himself
untouchable, seemingly possessed of immanent sense—the secret word—
which can be neither refuted nor denied. Of course, the secret may in fact be
nothing, Frost’s cloaked nihilism which pervades this game of obfuscation
and shares his balanced assessment that the unverifiable thing lying beneath
the surface may be truth or a pebble of quartz, some thing or nothing. What
he aspires to do is really quite extraordinary in its Socratic audacity, for he
would both convince one of his capacity for the most intense emotions—be
the lyricist—and convince one of his transcendence over those feelings to a
state in which the absurdity of the human pretension to knowing is the one
incandescent reality—be the consummate ironist.
And so, unlike the birds’ apparent subscription to a fairly monotonal
lament, the music of Frost’s poetry is intricate, multileveled, and powerful.
Poirier suggests this paradox in his assertion that Frost is “committed to the
most subtle, insinuating, and diffident kind of self-perception”; even as the
sound rises to assertiveness the message it speaks is of compromise, and thus
it manages to deny possibilities for empowerment while “surreptitiously”
keeping these possibilities alive.^22 It is always implied through his prosodic
virility that he could obliterate the bird song and make his own “Line Storm
Song” if he wished. “A Line-Storm Song” from A Boy’s Willcan be seen in
the context of the bird metaphor as an early prediction of what he fantasizes
might occur, poetically and sexually, when the moderate voice of reason is
stilled; a world genuinely reflective of passion—a true lyric song if it were to
be sung—is both sublime and terrible, productive of ecstasy and violence.
The poem suggests in its punning title its self-consciously lyrical (and
therefore potentially ironic) and generative nature; with each “line-storm”
touching off another, the poem may be seen as an explosive “song” whose
lines generate their own sequential energy. In “A Line-Storm Song,” the
birds are, quite literally, silenced; they “have less to say for themselves” than
the long-silent elves, while the rain and wind supersede both human voices
and the voices of the human-like birds. The speaker here calls for the wind
to “bruit our singing down,” and in the drowning of all sounds of sense, he
feels in the east wind an ancient flood of desire. The use of the curiously
ambiguous word “bruit” suggests the duality of the human/bird voice that
articulates both passion and sense, for the term, also spelled brute,can mean