Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 329to be freed /And sing the wild flowers up from root and seed.” For Frost
poetry resides not in free flight but in the beat of wings against the arc, words
fluttering hard against structure. Like the dark pine that seems “as a little
bird / Before the mystery of glass” in “The Hill Wife,” poetry is force barely
contained, leaving one to the fear and delight of “an oft-repeated dream / Of
what the tree might do” if the glass were to break: bondage, and discipline,
the barely concealed delight that comes from Frost’s insight into the
equivocal pleasures of containing and being contained. Frost, one might
reasonably maintain, is himself like the “great tree” seeming to be a little
bird, pushing against the barriers that he erects. These barriers are, it is
implied, too strong for the traditional symbol of lyricism to shatter but
necessary to contain the tremendous power of a less self-indulgent nature.
The bird metaphor carries a great deal of literary baggage, and thus the
little birds cannot get very high off the ground. So too, Frost seems to be
implying in his pinioning of the lyric birds, does poetry carry the excess
baggage of its literary heritage: it must find a new song, a new metalanguage
by which to regenerate itself. Frost may, in his domesticated, depressed birds,
be making one of his most subtle and sophisticated puns about literary
convention, in fact. In the autobiographical “The Bonfire,” his bluebirds
have the rug pulled out from under them—the “spent” breezes fail, leaving
them “Short of the perch their languid flight was toward.” But the poet’s fire
is first a pinnacle to heaven and then a wildfire. He starts the fire, he fuels it
with an inspirative gust, and he rubs it out; the languid bluebird may be spent
like the worn-out winter wind in April, but the poet emerges erect. The
bluebird may be earthbound, but Frost “walk[s] ... light on air in heavy
shoes,” his “feet” bound in blank verse but his poetic spirit soaring. The
bluebird is silent, freeing the poet to ignite a new kind of poetry. Frost’s birds
cannot measure up to his own poetic virility. They are talkers, but in a world
such as the Oven Bird describes, where things and words that name them are
metamorphic, language loses its penetrative function to fix or to pin down:
what is immobilized in Frost’s poetry is dead or hibernatory or momentarily
frostbound. The overlay of unstable irony that echoes this suspicion of fixed
“meaning” further keeps language from a “point” and suggests that its
function lies elsewhere.
This is a condition of language that inevitably invites formalism to
prevail over the epistemological circuities of unknowing, and, indeed, Frost’s
poetry has a formal rigor that resonates against unstable irony’s resistance to
closure and to the consummation of some mutual understanding with the
reader. The closure this formal rigor affords is not rationally situated. He
wants poetically to walk “light on air in heavy shoes,” maintaining a lovingly