Robert Frost, “Oven Bird”
Robert Frost, courtesy of the Library of Congress
The previous essay ended up with a praise of immanence, a fancy word which means being in the world, rather than above it (which is, in fancier terms, ‘transcendence’). The poem we are about to enter, Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” is also about immanence.
But unlike Williams, who was full of wonder at plums and the senses and the joy of language, Frost takes on a very tough issue: How do we live in the world when everything is not as it was formerly? For Williams, a plum is a (momentary) respite from and even recompense for being poor and old. Not so for Frost. In this poem, aging is at the fore. Not as in ‘a poor old woman,’ but the aging any reader of these essays has already experienced – even if he or she is chronologically young and not elderly. “The world was all before them,” John Milton proclaims at the end of Paradise Lost:
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; [ 645 ]
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
As we see, the new world which beckons is a world of diminishment. True, it is a new world, but it appears because paradise has been left behind. Paradise lost: that is Milton’s theme in his great epic. It is, likewise, the theme of Frost’s remarkable sonnet.
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
– Robert Frost
Calibrations and Recognitions
As I walked through a crowded Metro station here in Washington on a recent morning, I thought of our remarkable ability to navigate in space. Moving adroitly through the physical world is not purely a human ability of course: we share it with animals as diverse as ants, bats, and lions. Walking out the Metro car's door through crowds of people going in opposite directions, taking my place in the crowd merging into two lines to go up the escalator, debouching into the hall of Union Station where some were exiting, some rushing to get on a train, some buying stamps in the post office or croissants at Au Bon Pain, I thought about how miraculous it is that we don't barge into one another. It's not only sight and movement. It is also the constant calibration and recalibration by the brain: of where we are in space, our shifting position as we move, the shifting positions of others, all of which require bodily adjustments so that we don’t have collisions as we move through our surroundings.
That brings to mind another miracle, similar but also usually unacknowledged, of human functioning, common to us all, so familiar as to pass without notice is our ability to recognize faces and voices. I will have more to say about recognitions of that sort when I send out my next poem.
Calibrations and recognitions: I see poems performing these basic human functions in a realm analogous to, but not the same as, the physical world in which the body moves without banging into chairs or people or the physical world in which we so easily recognize our friend's face or our sister's voice.
Robert Frost's poem, “The Oven Bird,” is a poem of calibration. The poem is built on several easily recognizable literary tropes: the bird is personified, so that its song is given human meaning and human resonance. Then an analogy is extended between the bird and our human realm. Finally, another analogy is drawn between the passage of time as one season replaces another – as spring moves into summer – and the maturation of the human psyche.
This poem is rooted in New England. An oven bird is a small thrush, a species which gets its name because it builds a nest on the ground, a domed structure with an entrance on the side so that it resembles a small oven. With the wonders of the web, you can even hear its song: unexceptional, not particularly musical, its `prosaic' call is an element of the poem many of us would not be able to appreciate without the resources of the web recording. I myself read and taught the poem for many years without ever having heard the song of the oven bird. Now we can hear it, easily: go to http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ovenbird/sounds and click on the brief sound recording.
This poem is, to my mind, about calibration: about how the bird calibrates where he is in the year’s passage and then calibrates an appropriate response to his situation. If the poem works for us – for each reader must decide for herself whether the poem resonates with her experience – it affords a calibration for us as well. This poem presents, in about as brief a compass as is possible, the central dilemma of Romanticism: If life starts out so well, so full of possibility, what are we to make of the inevitable decline into the difficulties of maturity?
But the poem is not merely a presentation of the Romantic dilemma. It offers a tough-minded response to that dilemma. The poem, as we shall see, affords us a way to recalibrate our own lives, not only by seeing where we are at but also where we must go as we move forward.
Let’s start by recognizing the poem is a sonnet. Frost said, famously, of the tendency to free verse (and the abandonment of rhyme) in the modernist era, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Well, there’s a net here – fourteen rhymed lines – but the poem has got a pretty wild rhyme scheme: AABCBDCDEEFGFG. [In analyzing rhyme, each new rhyme is accorded a letter of the alphabet: ‘heard’ is an A, and ‘bird’ is too, but ‘again’ is different, and so it is a B, as will be ‘ten’ two lines down.]
The poem begins by describing the situation in which an oven bird is encountered: in the middle of the woods, in the middle of summer (which is important enough that “mid-summer” is repeated in the poem, in the fifth line). By metaphor, the “mid-summer” of the poem is equated with mid-life in the human realm. Spring is past and the leaves are old, not young [1].
The oven bird is loud and assertive, something we will want to recall when we come to the last lines of the poem. He tells us something by singing when other birds no longer sing. I’m jumping ahead to lines 12 and 13:
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
That is why the “solid tree trunks sound again.” Though the springtime songs of mating birds has stopped, the oven bird, in mid-day, mid-wood, mid-summer, sounds his warbles into the forest around.
The summer leaves are old (no longer the gold and pale green of spring, no longer tender shoots but toughened against the heat). Neither the world nor the trees are in flower: well, there are flowers, but in a mathematical ratio, mid-summer flowers are “as one to ten” when compared to the flowers of spring. Flowering, fragrance, beauty, are in shorter supply in summer forests.
The mathematical ratio indicating that the year is in decline becomes more descriptive, metaphorical and symbolic in the next four lines.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
Always a clear-eyed observer of the natural world, Frost here notes that in spring, after the first moments of blossoming, a gust of wind (represented here by “sunny days a moment overcast”) will blow the petals from flowering trees. It is one of the wonders of poems and of art in general that they can make us see things that we didn’t pay attention to, to see them with wonder and clarity ever afterward.
I do see that early petal-fall he describes here, each spring. In Washington the famous flowering cherries blossom: dozens bloom in the park between the Russell Building and Union Station, then all of a sudden they de-petal when a stray gust of wind swirls. What ensues is like a very late snowfall, “showers” of white drifting down from the branches to the ground.
Why is the petal-fall “early”? At first we only suspect they anticipate the snows of the following winter. But there is a deeper connection than to winter: their “fall” is an augury of another fall, the fall of the year, when what began in spring will march in autumn toward cold infertility. “And comes that other fall we name the fall.” Clearly, there are two falls being recounted here, that of the early petals falling down from the trees, and the autumn of the year.
Just as clearly, Frost refers to a symbolic fall as well. The Fall refers to the Biblical expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise into the world of suffering and death. Nor is this third ‘fall’ a mere surmise, for the allusion is emphasized and confirmed in the following line, “He says the highway dust is over all.” Yes, summer’s heat and drought replace spring rains, and in Frost’s New England country setting, where roads were unpaved, the dust from the roads certainly did cover the vegetation surrounding and human habitations as well. But it is impossible for any literate reader not to hear echoes of Genesis, where Adam was created out of dust – “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” – and, even more significantly, of course, God proclaimed to Adam and Eve concurrent with their expulsion from paradise, “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Frost has written a wonderful poem not only because of what it presents and the tough words we shall see it conclude wit, but also because there is such ease in the saying, such a comfort in moving from the mathematical to the gorgeous – “when pear and cherry bloom went down in showers.” All this is expressed in language that is as plain and as drawn from the vernacular as we found in Frost’s contemporary, William Carlos Williams. Until the penultimate word, there is not one word of more than two syllables in the poem. Words that are repeated are all simple, monosyllabic – three times for bird, fall, mid-, and sing; twice for make. The only two words of Latin derivation are “solid” and “diminished”.
Still, wonderful as the poem is, I never read it without thinking the line we have just considered, “He says the highway dust is over all,” could use revision. It seems to me too flat, too detached and too relentlessly symbolic. Poems are made things, of course, and very often what we make is far from perfect. This poem, I think, is perfect, except for this one slightly imperfect line. But perhaps I am wrong about this line?
Before we embark on the final quatrain, those last four lines, reflect on how temporal the poem is. It takes place in mid-summer. Line five clearly indicates that midsummer comes after spring. The trees have blossomed, and over time have lost their blossoms in that lovely “shower” occasioned by a passing “moment” when the clouds have obscured the sun. The autumn (fall) is coming. The “leaves are old” in line four: the dust of summer has replaced spring’s blooming.
Thus, we come to comprehend that the poem is about time and about how time is not redemptive: it is all decline after the exuberance of the early days, whether of the year or of one’s own life. The word “fall” is repeated three times because the poem is about falling from innocent beauty into prosaic dustiness, about leaving behind the profusion of spring songs for the repeated unmusical notes of the oven bird.
The oven bird, we are informed as we move through the poem, has nothing to celebrate.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The birds of spring have ceased their song. Meanwhile, the mid-summer bird persists, although his song is not a song. The economy of the paradox, so simply expressed, is breathtaking: “but that he knows in singing not to sing.” He will utter his birdsong, but he will not be celebrating. Song, but not song.
Thus, we come to the final sentence, two lines which to me encapsulate so much of what we must adjust to, must calibrate, in our lives. For in singing when there is nothing to celebrate: when all is lesser and falling and loss, the oven bird “frames” a question to us. That final line asks us to consider what very likely may be the single greatest calibration we human beings must make in our ongoingness.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
How do we accommodate to the hard truth that we live in time, and that in time the wonder of things diminishes, the splendor of beginnings fades?
I said earlier this poem presents us with the Romantic dilemma. As I wrote the final sentence in the previous paragraph, I wrote about ‘splendor.’ The word reminds me of one of the great statements of Romanticism, Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode,” and Wordsworth’s use of the word may be the reason I happened on it just now. In his poem, Wordsworth recalls “the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” which “fades into the light of common day.” (If you’re going to read Wordsworth, this poem, despite its reputation, is not the place to start. Nor the place to end up either, I would add. He has better poems, though this one is undeniably well made and highly regarded and eminently quotable. Heck, I just quoted it myself.)
Frost is so extraordinarily succinct: the question we face is “what to make of a diminished thing.”
He also, in a remarkable turn, answers that question. Not sufficiently. Let me repeat: not sufficiently. But in a postlapsarian world (postlapsarian is the fancy term for ‘after the Fall’), a world where we are aware of time and of diminishment and dissolution, a world we as adults cannot but choose to inhabit, answers will be provisional, tentative, never fully sufficient. That is part of Frost’s tough-mindedness: he too knows in singing not to sing.
But Frost does, without finding it sufficient in a diminished world, keep singing. This is a poem, and as such it is his response to the diminished world we together inhabit. He sings about the world, a double of the oven bird, although he like the bird “knows not to sing.”
As we look over the poem again, we see that it begins with song, with the “singer everyone has heard.” In some fashion the oven bird, singing when no others sing, is like Frost, making a poem of the diminished world when he does not know what to make of that diminishing.
Let me turn to another poet who uses a bird as his own double, Walt Whitman. Here is one of the greatest moments of self-recognition in all of American culture. Near the conclusion of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman recognizes that the lonely and bereft mockingbird he hears on a Long Island beach is an analogue to himself, a mirror in which he sees his own condition, a model for himself of what a poet is and can be:
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself – projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you…
The oven bird is to Frost as the mockingbird is to Whitman. I’m pretty sure Frost heard Whitman in the back of his mind when he wrote this poem. Not because he wanted to impress his readers with allusions, but because we all – all of us, not just the poets – live in a tapestry that human culture and human history has woven for us.
The “dust” in line ten was an allusion, a reference to Genesis. This solitary bird, calling the poet to his vocation, is deeper than that. It is as if Frost is answering Whitman, engaging in a dialogue with him, a dialogue that partly says, ‘You’re right, bird song does provide a model for our role as poets” and that partly says, ‘You’re wrong, it is not just loss of love that poets sing of, but a deeper loss than that, an inescapable fall into diminishment.’ (By the way, if you think back to high school English, you’ll see that Whitman himself is engaged in a dialogue with another American poet: his ‘nevermore’ in the lines I just cited echoes that famous “Nevermore” of the black bird, who answers all of Edgar Allen Poe’s questions with that single word in “The Raven.”)
The oven bird is a singer very similar to Frost, a model for how to sing in the face of an existence that is caught in inescapable decline. Let me conclude by pointing out that the poem is more than about singing – what we think poets do – in the face of that predicament, “what to make of a diminished thing.” Quite frankly, I am not a singer: I don’t write poems, and in the more common usage of song, I can’t even carry a tune. But this poem is about me, too. Hopefully you may recognize that it might be about you too, even if you likewise are not a poet.
For the poem does more than frame the question of “what to make of a diminished thing.” It answers that question with this: you make a song. Maybe not a paean of praise to the glories of human existence but a song that is not a complaint, either. There is no whining in “The Oven Bird.” What connects us to the poem, even those of us who are neither birds nor poets, is the necessity of making. Even if we can’t bring our lips to praise. After all, the bird doesn’t sing, even though he sounds a bird song: “He knows in singing not to sing.”
Frost understands the poet as maker. “For she was the maker of the song she sang,” Wallace Stevens wrote in a wonderful poem called “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Frost is the maker, just as the bird is, of a sort of a song. His song is a clear-eyed recognition of the diminished world we inhabit, the world which exists for us, as we sadly learn, only in time.
Frost’s song – the poem we have just read – is parallel to the song the bird sings “in all but words,” although he as a poet can and does use words. In a diminished world, he makes a poem.
Am I emphasizing the ‘making’ too much? I don’t think so. The bird “makes the solid tree trunks sound again” in line three. He makes a song that asks, for himself, for Frost, for us, what we can and should “make” of the diminished world.
The poem, then, celebrates not just singing and poetry, but the making that can only occur in maturity, a making dependent on endurance, a clear-eyed recognition of the conditions in which we exist, and a drive to make some kind of sense in the world. Or, to cite the famous penultimate phrase from the “Key West” poem by Stevens I cited above, “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,/The maker’s rage to order words of the sea…”
Recognition, endurance, a need to make sense of the world: “The Oven Bird” is about a making that is deeper than, though sometimes embodied in, song. That making, the poem strongly suggests, is how we calibrate our existence to fit into the diminished shape of things.
Footnotes
[1] “Nature’s first green is gold,” begins another Frost poem, also about the decline of spring’s vital beauty into the prosaic “so dawn goes down to day.” This brief poem is discussed in a later chapter.