Modern American Poetry

(^328) Katherine Kearns
“to noise abroad,” “to rumor,” or “to din.” Singing that is “bruited down” is
at once drowned out by the wind and noised abroad by it, as if the human
love song has two levels, a commonsensical level that the wind batters down
just as it has crushed the bird’s voices, and a passionate oversound that
resonates with the voices of the wind and the rain.
This world of passion is both lovely and violent: the birds’ songs are
“crushed like some / Wild, easily shattered rose” in order for the phallic
“rain-fresh goldenrod” to prevail. (One must think, inevitably, of “The
Subverted Flower” in the context of “A Line-Storm Song”; its female figure
stands waist-high in goldenrod, while the woman of “A Line-Storm Song” is
urged to wet her breast with “the rain-fresh goldenrod.”) The speaker’s
fantasy of passion includes “rout” and apocalypse, with the return of a
prehistoric sea that will retake dry land (which may be cultivated and
civilized) in its flood. “A Line-Storm Song” reiterates the seemingly
inextricable bond in Frost’s poetry between sexuality and danger or
violence—passion as line storms, as a bonfire, as a fireweed—and it suggests,
too, the link Frost makes between nature and uncontrol. It also suggests that
if Frost were to unleash his own lyric nature it would, he imagines, come in
storm and whirlwind, in lines of storm, rather than disguised as a patient
“minor” bird.
The bird metaphor in any of its manifestations must inevitably be self-
conscious, as Frost well knows when he sets out to subvert its romantic status
as an emblem of the free soul and the transcendent poetic spirit, but it cannot
fully escape its association with transcendence. Birds can fly; humans cannot.
Just as water is used to symbolize life because in a significant sense it islife,
birds symbolize transcendence because they have wings. Meaning is thus not
only inherited literarily but is inherent in form; the Oven Bird cannot
eradicate the lark or the nightingale despite its own cast-iron weight, and, in
fact, its preaching, premised upon their flightiness, brings them more
inevitably to mind. One may reasonably extend this analogy to poetry; it may
be disciplined at one level to carry the sound of (common) sense, but
fundamentally it is closer to song than to prose. The compromised flight and
the voice that knows in singing not to sing are thus Frost’s conscious and
somewhat ironic imposition of restraint on a form that he willfully
encourages to sing its own prosodic harmonies and to create its own line
storms. Like so many of Frost’s images of precarious withholding—walls
about to tumble, cold stars on the verge of wakening, still pools about to
become revelatory—these birds carry in their hollow wing bones the
potential to destroy their own enforced repose; their singing strength
“though repressed and moody with the weather / [Is] nonetheless there ready