Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 331energy is not to become dissolute. Spatial dissipation is a moral slippage as
well, and formal control is imperative.
The reiterated image of the impotent bird becomes a limited version of
the poet who must find a place from which to sing, for placement both
mirrors and creates form. The Oven Bird’s house is a concretized dome of
mud; it re-creates the arc of heaven in small and sings from the middle
ground that its “nest” suggests spatially. In “The Lockless Door” the speaker
writes of himself as a timid bird who, at a knock on the door, “emptied [his]
cage / To hide in the world / And alter with age.”^26 Neither the domestic
“cage” nor the natural hiding place can afford a perspective from which to
impose form; caged or hibernatory, the madman or the tame bird or the
woodchuck, one so encased does not create form but is formed by his space.
“On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep” obliquely suggests in its version of
evolutionary adaptation that the speaker endorses the safety of the
unawakened, ventriloquistic voice that seems to come from where it isn’t:
“Partly because it sang ventriloquist / And had the inspiration to desist /
Almost before the prick of hostile ears” the bird remained unharmed. The
ventriloquistic function of the poet/bird—the mimicry of voices thrown onto
wooden figures—ensures a very limited range and power; he sits on a low
bush, hidden, and gives a short, muted whistle. But ventriloquism—thrown
language—subverts form by disembodiment, and while Frost’s
“ventriloquism” vivifies a whole series of speakers, his full poetic voice makes
it apparent that they remain just that: “speakers” who reproduce words but
do not create or originate sound, meaning, or form.
Most frequently, Frost chooses to occupy poetically the borderlands
between civilization and nature, a destabilized place where language is both
created and destroyed but where, paradoxically, form may be perceived to
emerge triumphant from the eternal decay and resurrection of particulars.
His birds, another kind of border creature, are so humanized that they sit in
nature taking as their view and as their theme human concerns. Frost, on the
other hand, keeps an eye always on the outer boundaries, the place where
cultivation yields to wildness. “My address is Amherst Mass, though really we
are living in the abandoned town of Pelham so close to the woods that if the
wood burn our house must go too,” he writes to Amy Lowell (Letters220).
The successive qualifications of his literal place are telling—his address, what
one would write down on a letter, is not really where he lives, just as in “New
Hampshire” he is writing from Vermont. Where he is, actually, is in an
abandoned town, which places it, as so many of his households are placed
within the poetry, at a point of linguistic and actual transformation: when is
a town no longer called a town and what does it then become?^27 For practical