[In the following essay, Hollander discusses Robert Frost's place in “poetic ornithology.”]

Mythologizing a construction of nature's—an animal, plant, geological formation, moment of process—could be seen both as a desecration and a celebration of pragmatically considered fact. When this goes on in poetry—what Frost called “the renewal of words for ever and ever”—it is accompanied and invigorated by a reciprocal mythologizing, as it were, of the very words used in the poetic process.¹ Literature is full of purely mythological, mostly composite, creatures—phoenix, unicorn, basilisk, chimera, hydra, centaur—as nature is even more full of creatures totally innocent of interpretation—woodchuck, anteater, turbot, Shetland pony, jellyfish, quail.

But then there are the fallen creatures—lion, eagle, ant, grasshopper, barracuda, fox, hyena—who have been infected with signification from Aesop on. It is one of the tasks of poetry to keep renewing the taxonomic class of such creatures, by luring them, unwittingly, into a cage of trope (which of course, they are not aware of inhabiting). Such new reconstructions of animals are almost a post-romantic cottage industry, even as the rehearsal again and again of the traditional ones characterized pre-romantic emblematic poetry. Significant emblematic readings of previously unread creatures can do the work of reinventing them—I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes's chambered nautilus, for example, as well as animals of Baudelaire and Rilke. I want to reconsider in these pages a well-known instance of such reconstruction in the case of Frost's oven bird. And it is in no way to compromise the kind of somewhat old-fashioned reading of the poem I intend to give (in the words of Reuben Brower quoted by Poirier, “what is it like to read ‘The Oven Bird’”) that I shall explore the literary environment of poetic ornithology which Frost's poem partly exemplifies and partly rejects.²

North American poetry has no living nightingales or skylarks upon which to descant, observe, meditate, or preach. Our literature inherited a museum of textual ones, from Ovid's Philomela through Milton's almost personally emblematic nightingale, through the more naturalized bird of Coleridge's conversation poem, “The Nightingale,” and on to Keats's.³ John Crowe Ransom's account is more mythographic than ornithological:

Not to these shores she came! this other Thrace,
Environ barbarous to the royal Attic;
How could her delicate dirge run democratic,
Delivered in a cloudless, boundless public place
To an inordinate race?(4)

And for the younger T. S. Eliot, the fallen form of the nightingale singing in the royal Attic (“once within the bloody wood / When Agamemnon cried aloud”) in modernity can only shit on an allusively invoked sequence of American failures, letting “their liquid siftings fall / To stain the stiff, dishonored shroud,” and thereby not only on the “dim, dishonored brow” of Whittier's treacherous “Ichabod,” but on morally purposeful poetry itself.

A glance at the aetiology of the poetic bird would certainly take in the old, blind Milton's later nightingale (not his youthful question-raiser, of whom more later on), who “sings darkling” at the beginning of the third book of Paradise Lost. It is answered by Keats (“darkling, I listen”) in his nightingale poem. Shelley's skylark, Blake's lark, George Meredith's wonderful “The Lark Ascending” are all daylight's reciprocal poetical birds and poetical surrogates. Even Yeats's aggressively unnatural clockwork golden bird in “Sailing to Byzantium” partakes of the lark-nightingale tradition. But in the transatlantic new world, skylarkless and unnightingaled, another mythologized bird replaced them. There is a sequence of poems—from Richard Lewis's remarkable poem of the 1740s, through those of Joseph Rodman Drake, Sidney Lanier and Walt Whitman—which re-trope the skylark-nightingale for American poetry as the mockingbird.

Lewis's “A Journey from Patapsko to Annapolis,” telling in Augustan couplets, but from a Thomsonian perspective, of a trip along the Maryland coast in the 1730s, describes an encounter with a mockingbird. It so allegorizes the creature as the voice of the new-old American Imagination that—regardless of the poem itself remaining largely in oblivion until this century—never again would mockingbirds' song be the same. The passage is splendid enough to quote entire here:

But what is He who, perched above the rest
Pours out such various Music from his Breast!
His Breast whose Plumes a cheerful white display,
His quiv'ring Wings are dress'd in sober Grey.
Sure, all the Muses, this their Bird inspire!
And He, alone is equal to the Choir
Of warbling Songsters who around him play,
While, Echo like, He answers every lay.
The chirping Lark now sings with sprightly Note,
Responsive to her Strain He shapes his Throat:
Now the poor widow'd Turtle wails her Mate,
While in soft Sounds he cooes to mourn his Fate.
O sweet Musician, thou dost far excell
The soothing Song of pleasing Philomel;
Sweet is her Song, but in few Notes confin'd
But thine, thou Mimic of the feath'ry Kind,
Runs through all Notes!—Thou only knowst them All,
At once the Copy,—and th'Original.(5)

It is not only the anticipation both of Thoreau's echo that is “to some extent, an original sound” and of Frost's “counter-love, original response” in “The Most of It” that is slightly uncanny here.⁶ It is almost as if a transcendence of limitation in genres, modes, conventions, styles—the belated not as incapacitated but inspired by its knowledge of what preceded it—were being embodied in an attendant of the Muse of the New.

Lewis's poem lays the ground for what will be a subsequent tradition. Joseph Rodman Drake's claim in “The Mocking-Bird” (published 1812) for the bird as poet is a bit more plonkingly expository. Twenty-three octosyllabic couplets of description catalogue—with less poetic glossing than Lewis—the repertoire (the voices of jay, quail, sparrow, cat-bird, red-bird, robin, black-bird, blue-bird, swallow, lark) of a mockingbird encountered on a May morning walk he admittedly moralizes:

                    In this bird can fancy trace
An emblem of the rhyming race.
Ere with heaven's immortal fire
Loud they strike the quivering wire …
Soft and low each note they sing,
Soft they try each varied string …(7)

Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Pope, Homer and—last and surely least—Campbell, are catalogued in that order as reciprocals of the birds: as Mockingbird sums up over these, so Poet sums up over those.

The interesting southern poet, Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847), refigures the mockingbird in his sonnet, not as the fruitfully problematic American Originality, like Lewis, but as a kind of composite clown, sometimes a fellow of infinite jest, sometimes “the melancholy Jaques”:

Wit, sophist, songster, Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school,
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch mocker and mad abbot of misrule!(8)

In effect, the bird's “mocking” has been construed not in its proper (but today, less common) sense of imitating, but as deriding: he is a satirist, rather than an allusive singer. But by and large, the mockingbird of subsequent southern tradition partakes of the sentimental souvenir in the refrain of Stephen Foster's song (“Listen to the mock-ing-bird, Listen to the mock-ing-bird”). Sidney Lanier's elevated singer perches “Superb and sole upon a plumèd spray”; his range is more than, in previous instances, summary, for “Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.” But Lanier's “The Mocking Bird” ends with a pseudo-riddle; the bird having gobbled up a grasshopper, the sonnet weakly inquires “How may the death of that dull insect be / The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree?”⁹ While Shakespeare can be considered as being legitimately adduced (given that the bird can say what was both done and dreamed), the fairly empty question embraces what isn't much of a paradox after all.

The greatest and most poetically powerful mockingbird, the male of the pair of “feather'd guests from Alabama,” is Whitman's “singer solitary, projecting me,” the bird singing of its loss to the “outsetting bard,” to the “undertone” of the sea, “the savage old mother incessantly crying.” The transumption, in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” of Keatsian and Shelleyan nightingale and skylark, and of earlier poetic mockingbird alike, is a far more profound matter than the mere Americanization of English poetic tradition. The bird is shaken loose from even contingent personification, and extended another, a new, kind of personhood, in the first place. And given the role of the sea (“the savage old mother incessantly crying”) in this great exemplar of what Harold Bloom has called Whitman's “shore odes,” the relations of bird, boy, and their crucial occasions (of personal loss and poetic translation of birdsong) are determined by the liminal condition of the sea-shore. “Darkling,” says Keats of his nightingale's song, “I listen”; we might paraphrase Whitman's remembered boy as implying that “Sea-ing, I listened.” The mockingbird here is a truly “original response” to a convention which it outdoes as it seems to ignore. Like Whitman's self-portrait in Song of Myself 4, his fiction is “Both in and out of the game [of convention], and watching and wondering at it.”

On the other hand, Richard Hovey's revisionist mockingbird (1896) is well on his way to modernist demystification; he promises to “make it all clear” saying “I will let you know / Where the footfalls go / That through the thicket and over the hill / Allure, allure.” But the proto-modern bird—for whom, probably, the creature of nineteenth-century tradition might as well be a troped-out European nightingale—never delivers on this, as the speaker of this brief lyric concludes “But he will not tell, he will not tell, / For all he promises so well.”¹⁰

It was to the received avian agenda in general that modern poetry felt unable to subscribe. Richard Wilbur spoke for all his twentieth-century precursors in the early 1950s, I believe, in “All These Birds” that

Hawk or heavenly lark or heard-of nightingale
          Perform upon the kitestrings of our sight
          In a false distance … the day and night
          Are full of winged words
                                                  gone rather stale
                    That nothing is so worn
                    As Philomel's bosom-thorn …

But Wilbur's late-modernist plea for a powerful ornithology to replace empty mythological clichés goes beyond its own strong demands for a demythologizing of what are, imaginatively speaking, stuffed owls. It pleads for new tropes of birdhood and avian particularity by showing both the limits and the consequent utility of a biological reductionism:

                              Let us, with glass or gun,
Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky
          Dwindle to habit, habitat and song,
          And tell the imagination it is wrong
          Till, lest it be undone
                                                  it spin a lie
                              So fresh, so pure, so rare
                              As to possess the air.(11)

For modernity, thrushes are previously unmystified songbirds that can be more than part of what Wordsworth in the famous lines from The Recluse calls “A history only of departed things / Or a mere fiction of what never was” (803-804), and Thomas Hardy's great poem of half-hearted—but at least, half-hearted—hurrah for the commencement of the twentieth century propounds a scruffy old thrush as prophetic singer. The adjective in the title of the “The Darkling Thrush” manifests the revisionary relation of the bird in the poem to the “darkling” poet-nightingales of Milton and Keats.

Then, too, there is Whitman's other singer, the hermit-thrush of “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd,” who, along with those same lilacs, flies into The Waste Land to provide that dread vision's one moment of unironized melodic surcease. Whitman had not heard a hermit-thrush (a somewhat rare bird), but learned of it from John Burroughs. Moreover, he mistakenly put him among conifers (where the bird will not be found in the eastern United States), singing “Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.” Eliot, whose hermit-thrush clearly sang to him from Whitman's pages, has him singing “in the pine trees.”

I should guess that Robert Frost, knowing well of The Waste Land in 1941, and in better knowledge of thrushes and where and when they sing, sets up in “Come In” a literary thrush singing out of the pillared, dark wood. This is a wood possibly of classical tragedy, possibly even—as we shall see—of high modernism; but the “thrush music” is a call that must be evaded, even by acknowledging that a bird can be said to “sing” perhaps, yet not legitimately to invite (or, one supposes, to promise, swear, or to commit any illocutionary act). By suggesting that the darkening of evening is more than merely diurnal—and, consequently, that the “west” is something like a Spenglerian Abendland—the stakes are made rather high:

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went—
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.(12)

In Frost's poem, the seemingly audible vocation from the wood is rejected in favor of a higher, totally silent call:

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

(There is a price to be paid for the coyness of the acknowledgment in the last two lines—I can almost hear Emerson retorting, from one part of his page, “Of course you'd been asked! And you won't be again!” and, from another part of that same page, “Of course you hadn't, and don't make such a fuss about it!”)

But perhaps the essential modern rejection of a trope of birdsong is Wallace Stevens's, in “Autumn Refrain,” his near-sonnet of 1931—ten years earlier than “Come In.” In this poem (about not being able to write anything for two years), grackles lately blattering recall to him the whole avian tradition, and its perhaps empty literariness:

The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear …(13)

and he opts out of all of it: the typically bivalent phrase “the evasions of the nightingale” refers both to evading the poetic nightingale issue and what said nightingale issue itself evades.

The poem ultimately finds, as Harold Bloom suggests, some difficult but important “residuum” in the desolate sound of the grackles. There is a great deal to be said of the Stevensian distrust of bird-song, but it is now time to turn to my central text, Frost's powerful and problematic contribution to poetic ornithology, the—in this case, accepted—thrush of “The Oven Bird.” The poem invoking it negotiates a remarkable course between a rhetoric of certainty about what a bird is singing/saying/doing, and a strong inner sense of its “evasions.” And it maintains a very un-Stevensian, albeit parabolic, awareness of natural fact.

First, though, the unpoetic ornithology: Seiurus aurocapillus, a ground-walking warbler, is common in deciduous woods; it builds a domed nest on the ground and sings from an exposed perch on the understory. That an American poem addressing—or addressing itself to—this thrush-like bird might consider its ground-built, oven-shaped nest, would seem obvious, with interpretations of some sort of pragmatical sublime, being well-grounded instead of lofty, immediately offering themselves. But the poem we are to consider does not.

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.(14)

“The Oven Bird”

Robert Frost's sonnet was started in New Hampshire around 1906 but probably finished in England around 1914, far from the shared habitat of bird and poet. Its ending leaves us with a kind of riddle. The opening puzzles us also, slightly, but in a different way: sonnets don't start out with couplets, unless they intend to continue—and as they rarely do—with six more of them. But both octave and sestet of this one are initiated by couplets, and in the latter instance, somewhat strangely for other reasons as well. From the outset, too, we notice at once how casual and how problematic its rhetoric is. “A singer everyone has heard?”—come now, people in London who have no more heard that singer than a New Englander could hear a nightingale? No: this is the conventional palaver of nature-writing, of a newspaper feuilleton of the sort that you might still find in a rural newspaper in England (or, more likely, being sent up in a Monty Python routine). But the low-literary, prosaic tone is modulated with a jolt, as the second line declares its ulterior agenda, with a “Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird”: because of the contrastive stress marking the new coinage “mid-wood,” the spatial reciprocal of the ordinary, temporal “mid-summer,” the line ends with three stresses (you might call it two overlapping spondees), confirming the opening, intrusive, almost self-descriptive, “Loud.”

The bird “makes the solid tree trunks sound again,” but at a first reading this always itself sounds strange. It is not just the densely alliterative pattern, first pointed out by Reuben Brower. “Sound again”—have they been unsound? No, not Germanic “sound” (Modern German gesund) but French and Latin sonorous “sound”; still, why do we pause momentarily? Do we mistake this bird for a kind of woodpecker, hitting the trunks directly, and thus making them less gesund as they make them resound? But it is this purely English and non-Latin way of putting resound that then allows the matter of an echo of a prior sounding—that of the earlier—and perhaps for this poem, ordinary and, despite literary cliché, unpoetic—spring birds, since silent.

Then comes the first of the three reiterated assertions of his asserting: “He says …”; it will be apparent later why it is not the seventeenth/eighteenth-century locution, the transitive “he sings,” or its version in the nineteenth century and later, “he sings of [whatever it is]” etc. What “He says” first is hardly celebratory, but pragmatically observational quite this side of sounding dirge-like.

The next thing he says is more interpretive, at first reminding us of the dropping of spring blossoms, and of how we tend to read these as nothing more dire than the end of a particularly gorgeous overture or prelude, but then letting the resonance of the term “petal-fall” linger on. As if to make us think, “Yes, they do fall, don't they. …” We half notice, too, the phonological patterning here, in which one dactylic foot embracing a hyphenated compound is echoed by another on another (unhyphenated) one: “… early [petal-fall] is past / When pear and [cherry bloom]. …” But woven across this is an alliterative pattern, in which petal/past/pear enact a different kind of connection, followed by the analogous but more potently expressive assonance of “went down in showers”. Yet this line is not end-stopped here, but flows into the phonologically plain “On sunny days a moment overcast.” But there is another mode of resonance at work, one of word rather than of word-sound. There is a subtle aroma of nuance here: the leaves are cast under, in—and for—a moment, even as the sky is momentarily overcast; the point isn't loudly made nor brandished triumphantly, but allowed wonderfully to happen.

But then things become problematic again. Who says “And comes that other fall we name the fall”? This line is all the more complex and problematic here because it initiates the sestet, and we want the full stop at the end to be a comma, as if to say “When fall—that other fall—comes, he says [with respect to that] that the highway dust is covering everything.” The normal grammar would be that of “come the fall” (“come Sunday,” etc.); the present third-person singular verb form here suggests a counter-thrusting inversion (“And [then] comes that other fall … etc.”). But the first reading would also reaffirm syntactically a linkage that the couplet-rhyme (again, in an anomalous place for a sonnet) is implying. Yet the couplet is broken. And we are reminded by the disjunction that the covering of highway-dust—the stasis in between petal-fall which initiates fullness of leaf, and leaf-fall which initiates bareness of branch—is midsummer stuff, and we can't have the syntax the way we'd like to. As for the coming of the real fall (the early “petal fall” is the “other”)—we'd needed the oven bird to point out to us that it was a version of the primary one, a shadowy type of the truth of autumn. And, by Miltonic extension, the autumnal “fall” as type of the fall from Paradise, the Original one we name The Fall, which brought about the remodelling of Paradise into Nature, fracturing spring from fall, promise from conditional fulfillment.

Relations between literal and figurative falling are made even more interesting by the fact that in the romance part of English, “cause” and “case” are based ultimately on cadere, as in the Germanic part we still have residues of the earlier usage “it fell …” for “it happened.” There are all those other falls, too. (I'm not sure whether the poem's relative reticence on this question keeps them at a safe distance or not—or is there any safe distance from The Fall?) Poirier remarks of this moment in the poem that “any falling—of leaves, of snow, of man … can be redeemed by loving, and the sign of this redemption is, for Frost, the sound of the voice working within the sounds of poetry.”¹⁵ Certainly, the cadential full stop at the end of this line makes us momentarily more aware of the working of the poet's voice. But in any case, the peculiar one-line sentence, which makes us keep wanting to open it out into a dependent clause and a full couplet with a comma, gives us meditative pause. Perhaps it works as something of a springboard pour mieux sauter into a final quatrain which, in sonnet form, can seem itself to initiate a moment of (at least, structural) renewal.

Some of that quatrain's complexity emerges in a straightforward paradox: what does it mean not to sing in singing?¹⁶ Well, if the “singing” birds do herald and celebrate spring and the morning—or, as with swallows, fill the sky with skitterish evening hymns—then the oven bird's repeated disyllabic utterance is not that. “He says,” “he says,” “he says,” “he knows” “he frames” (and here, another kind of figurativeness in the trope of material construction); we call the sounds birds make singing, but this bird demands that we suspend the overtones of the word “sing.” His are not songs, but propositions: the very subtle rhythm of the line makes this clear, for in order for the rhyming syllables to be sufficiently stressed, it must go not as “in singing not to sing,” as the intoning of the paradox seems to demand, but rather “in singing not to sing”—not to be claimed by allegorizing human attention as music, but instead as speculative discourse.

By this point in the poem, the casual older fiction of bird song—like that of wind in the trees sighing, and brook babbling—cannot be acknowledged. So it is that he frames a question “in all but words,” a formulation which is rhetorically quite reticent (birds don't really talk, of course but …). The very grammar of the phrase “knows in singing” is unusually resonant: (1) as has been suggested, the bird knows—while singing, not to “sing,” but rather discursively to raise questions; (2) the bird knows not to sing (literally) in-and-by singing (figuratively); (3) knowing-in-singing: like Sidney's “loving in truth,” a kind of knowing in singing? or as if singing were itself a kind of mental process here? In any event, this song is a matter of knowledge, not of charm, of sense making a claim on tra-la-la: I think here—regarding the issue, always crucial for Frost, of the sound of making sense—of how great jazz musicians would often play their purely instrumental solos to the words, singing the text (with a complex systems of rhythm all its own) internally, in order properly to inform the inventions of the melody alone. In the oven bird's case, perhaps, we implicitly reject “frames in all but music”—birds song being only figuratively that—and leap over any literal musical agenda even as a poet's “cano” means “I write.”¹⁷

It could also be observed that this sonnet itself, like so many of the other poems in Mountain Interval, “knows in singing not to sing.” This is not in the way of Yeats's “Words for Music Perhaps” (a phrase which in its way defines all lyric poetry in English from Wyatt and Surrey on); this is more of an implicit revisionary construction of the lyrical of high modernism, and may in some ways anticipate the rejection of the thrush's musical pseudo-invitation in “Come In.”

Be that as may be, we come to the oven bird's question itself, which may indeed be two questions. Our colloquial phrase “to make [something] of X” can mean to reshape it, use it as material for some new Y, etc. But to ask “what do you make of X” means “how do you explain, analyze, interpret X?”—“What's with X?” These strangely paired meanings are those of to construct, and to construe. They both come from the same Latin verb (and are indeed, with unfortunate consequences about fifteen years ago, both designated by the same French word, construire). The first of the bird's implied questions, then, is that of what to do with something residual—in this case, summer, but by implication life itself: we are nel mezzo del cammin here—something diminished by half. How shall we live the rest of our summer?

The oven bird does not celebrate spring, whether cheerfully, or even problematically, like the cuckoo of Love's Labors Lost; it does not pierce the night, in cheerful lieu of illumination, like the winter owl paired with it at the end of that same play. It is neither skylark, singing invisibly at the height of the day, nor the alternatively invisible nightingale. It talks neither of beginnings nor endings, but of a time that is both, in a Janus-like July, looking back and forward at once to an original and a final fall. Mid-points are strange, and they tend not to generate the ceremonies that beginnings and endings do. Midsummer in England tends to mean the solstice, June 21 or thereabouts. But that is not what he celebrates. We tend to think of our Northeastern American “midsummer” as somewhere around July 30 or so, and this is the oven bird's time, a somewhat indiscernible middle (rather than a clearly marked center).

And thus the bird's other possible question points toward and away from this matter: “what to make of”—how to construe, understand, interpret, the residual. “Is the bottle of summer half full or half empty?”—the invitation to consider the question is not that of the ordinary, crackpot realist cynical put-down of epistemology. I think that the invited discourse on the question, and what it would mean about you and summer to answer it either way, would lie along a line of pragmatic approaches to questioning somewhere between William James and later Wittgenstein. Poirier looks at the question from the point of view of the imaginative energies it generates, referring to “the creative tension between a persistent rising and a natural falling—a poise of creativity in the face of threatened diminishments.”¹⁸

Another way of putting this suggests that one of these diminishments might be thought of as that of the prior tradition itself—Richard Wilbur's “winged words / gone rather stale”; and in that kind of subsequent allegorizing that strong poems tend to exude, one thing to make of that diminished thing is, by means of newly animated words, “The Oven Bird” itself. And then, as is the case with very powerful and deep poetic ambiguities, the invitation extends to considering the relation between the two kinds of making of, between construing and constructing, in which representation is creation, and understandings are imagined: this relation is poetry's realm (as it may not be philosophy's, despite the woodpecker hammering at such a suggestion of the kind of institutional construing recently called deconstruction). And finally, we observe how the line itself (“what to make of a diminished thing”) sings its way into the reader's attention with its assonantal diminished thing that itself diminishes the accentual and thereby the rhetorical weight thrust upon the word “thing” by being put in terminal rhyming position (not “diminished thing” but “diminished thing”).

The way in which the oven bird, “as other birds,” too, got to speak, learned what we might call not his sing-song but his say-song—and his way of framing questions “in all but words”—is also part of Frost's concern. Virgil invents what Ruskin would call the pathetic fallacy in his very first eclogue, in which the shepherd Tityrus, lentus in umbra—at ease in the shade—formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas—teaches the woods to resound with the name of his girlfriend Amaryllis, and thereby teaching nature to talk poetically to us for the first time.¹⁹

Another one of Frost's great sonnets, “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same,” tells its own aetiological story of how birds got to talk, and it is worth considering here for a moment in its relation to the oven bird poem. (A much weaker earlier poem, “The Aim Was Song,” propounds another version of such an aetiology.) That story involves the imprinting of a human “tone of meaning, but without the words” onto birds' song, an added “oversound” (perhaps as Frost's revision of the ambiguous post-Spenserian word “under-song”).²⁰ The “He” of the opening line (“He would declare and could himself believe”) frames the fiction that Eve's voice, “When call or laughter carried it aloft,” added to previously unmeaning birdsong “Her tone of meaning but without the words.” That “he” seems to be both Adam, or a poet (writing, and then possibly even “believing,” his myth). The oven bird's question obviously comes along fairly late in the development of avian discourse. A linkage perhaps more than trivial with the earlier sonnet can be also found in the much more dramatic use of the broken—here, final—couplet. The poem looks at first to conclude with a “bottom line,” as it were, the consequential reiteration of the title: “Never again would birds' song be the same.” But then, after the full stop, comes the carefully intoned afterthought: “And to do that to birds was why she came” (leaving the implicit question “To do exactly what to birds, by the way? to teach them? infect them? trope them? what?”) resonating after this second ending. Ultimately she made them into makers of what Poirier in another context calls signs that are “forever mixed into the wilderness of only possible meaningfulness.”²¹ In yet another major sonnet, “Design,” there is a similarly broken final couplet that leaves a final implicit question hanging. In that poem it is effected by the slightly more melodramatic punctuation of a dash following a question mark pointing the last of three questions that comprise the sestet: “What but design of darkness to appall?—/ If design govern in a thing so small.”

I should like to return to one comment from the Field Guide to North American Birds that I omitted when referring to it earlier in this discussion. The oven bird's song is characterized as “a loud and clear tea-cher repeated about 10 times, louder and louder.” (It has been argued that, since the oven bird, like many others, also produces a different, high-flying song for a time in spring, that the poem is either suppressing discussion of this with a rhetorical strategy of its own, or repressing it. I do not believe that either of these is the case, and that the lesser-known fact is not, in this instance to be considered as being deployed in the poem—either for the fact of early, youthful spring-song vs. sober, didactic middle-age, or, more complicatedly, for the fact of its being very little-known).²² Like many good teachers of certain kinds, his lesson goes far beyond what “he says” into parable, and into questions about questioning. As a poetic fiction of a teaching bird, he seems to be a very guarded, transumptive revision of a particular earlier one, Wordsworth's throstle in “The Tables Turned”:

He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your teacher.

The last of these lines is rather awkward in its sound: the near-rhyming, echoic relation of nature/teacher is so out of character for the language of poems from Lyrical Ballads like “We Are Seven,” “Expostulation and Reply,” and this one that it feels inadvertent and out of control. This awkwardness casts modern doubt on the authenticity of the quoted expostulation. Thus all birds, even pulpited ones, are not true teachers, and I must note in closing how Frost's bird again recalls a sub-tradition—but a less diminished one—of poems which consider not merely eloquent, but questioning birds. The young Milton's first sonnet was on the nightingale, and what to make of it: for the young, poetically ambitious, virginal poet, was the bird's song a call to attend to a muse or a lover? Was it about sex or poetry? The poem ends with this question, the bird in question in this case involving Milton's nightingale knowing in singing not to say.²³

This can also be a lighter matter, of course. There is something uncannily Frost-y about Christopher Pearse Cranch's “Bird Language” (from an 1875 collection), particularly at the opening:

One day in the bluest of summer weather,
                    Sketching under a whispering oak,
I heard five bobolinks laughing together
                    Over some ornithological joke.
What the fun was I couldn't discover
                    Language of birds is a riddle on earth,
What could they find in whiteweed and clover
                    To split their sides with such musical mirth?(24)

The “riddle on earth” seems at first here a social conundrum of the dinner-table sort, whose solution will elicit unaffected laughter but will open up no deeper riddles. But at the poem's conclusion, it becomes clear that the riddle is indeed a funny mystery of a sort:

Vain to conjecture the words they are singing;
                    Only by tones can we follow the tune …

“By tones” allows of the paraphrase of birdsong by human musical constructs only, and not by discursive glossing. This is not Eve's “tone of meaning but without the words”: inscribed in Cranch's bird language is at most natural laughter at the strivings of the pathetic fallacy in human interpreters.

In any event, birds seem to have learned to put questions—at any rhetorical level—fairly late in poetic history. Coleridge's almost hilariously fustian owlet Atheism (from “Fears in Solitude”) “Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, / Drops its blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close, / And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven / Cries out ‘Where is it?’” Conversely, the owl who thought he was God in one of James Thurber's Fables for Our Time is misconstrued as interrogating in only one of its three calls, “Hoo” [?]. Of more epistemological interest—and closer to those of the oven bird's concerns, are the “wakened birds” in Stevens's “Sunday Morning,” who “Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings.”²⁵

Frost's oven bird, then, is not a universal, but a local singer, framing a question of which you can make a number of things. He is not, like Minerva's owl, an emblem of wisdom, but rather an instance of acquiring wisdom—“doing philosophy” in the parlance of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, rather than standing for it. As a poetic bird, he is an American poet-teacher. And the teacher-poet who makes a poem out of him is fully able to acknowledge that. There are all sorts of complex attitudes—let alone, whatever it had come to make of Eve's “call or laughter”—which must be gleaned from modern birdsong. And yet it sometimes sounds as if the song of the threshold—the qualifications, retractions, considerations, economies of the powerfully unsystematic—can only be philosophy.

Notes

1. In a letter to Robert P. Tristram Coffin, quoted in Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 190.

2. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 184.

3. There is an engaging discussion of the mythologized nightingale before Milton in Leonard Lutwack, Birds in Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994), 1-17.

4. John Crowe Ransom, “Philomela,” in Selected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 63.

5. Richard Lewis, “A Journey from Patapsko to Annapolis,” in Gentlemen's Magazine, 2 (London, 1732), 669. This passage is immediately followed by a visual parallel with the hummingbird. There is a brilliant discussion of “The Mocking-Bird as a Figure of Echo” in Eleanor Cook's “Birds in Paradise: Uses of Allusion in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens and Ammons,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987), 421-443, particularly 421-428.

6. In the “Sounds” chapter of Walden (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 420.

7. Joseph Rodman Drake, “The Mocking-Bird,” in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: The Library of America, 1993), 1:204.

8. American Poetry, 1:85-86.

9. American Poetry, 2:423.

10. American Poetry, 2:564.

11. Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 269-70. The high-modernist debunking of romantic fictions is at once exemplified and parodied in Aldous Huxley's Mark Rampion (a quasi D. H. Lawrence) in Point-Counterpoint, when he complains on behalf of the skylark that its birdhood was compromised by Shelleyan mythmaking, and that any self-respecting skylark would have “dropped something in his eye.”

12. Edward Connery Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1969), 334.

13. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 160. Also see Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 91-92.

14. Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost, 119-120.

15. Richard Poirier, Robert Frost, The Work of Knowing, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 74.

16. An overtone of Keats might lurk in what may possibly be an allusive “cease” (“The bird would cease and be as other birds”) echoed from Keats's nightingale ode: not only cease = desist from singing, but Keats's cease = stop existing. But I'm not at all sure of this.

17. See my Figure of Echo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 135.

18. Poirier, Robert Frost, 75.

19. And “never again”: the reciprocal of this might be the little fiction about the poet Stesichorus in an epigram in the so-called Garden of Meleager, to the effect that “just after his birth, a creature of the air, a nightingale from somewhere, settled secretly on his lips and struck up its clear song.” Trans. W. R. Paton, in The Greek Anthology Book II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), 1:69. This provides an interesting comment on some of the ancient Greek prejudice against the music of wind, rather than of Apollonian stringed instruments.

20. See my Melodious Guile (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 161.

21. Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism, 103.

22. The issue of the alternative song is discussed by Guy Rotella in “Metaphor in Frost's ‘Oven Bird’” in Earl J. Wilcox, ed., Robert Frost: The Man and the Poet (Conway, Arizona: UCA Press, 1990), 18-27. He discounts the neglect of this question by other critics, but may perhaps wrongly adduce a relevance himself. The point is, I think, that either the earlier high-song figures here or not, in which case Frost either (a) didn't know of it himself, or (b) forgot it. It is wrong here, I think, to argue that the high-song is some bit of natural lore that Frost expects the reader to have been versed in, and can therefore totally suppress mention of, in order that the reader acknowledge and interpret both the lore and the ad hoc suppression of it. This indeed might be the case with a suppressed quasi allusion by Nabokov, for example. But not here. Frost does want his readers to be versed in natural things (such as the fact that wet braided ropes expand along their length, rather than contracting, as they dry—unlike, say, leather thongs—and thus can be said to “relent,” as in “The Silken Tent”) as, indeed, to be versed in scriptural verses (such as Mark 4:11-12 in “Directive”) or classical verses (so as to be able to recognize that “For Once, Then, Something” is in Catullan hendecasyllabics, thereby to frame some agenda of counter-reproach). But in all these cases, the allusion is manifest. Could, indeed, the earlier high-song be legitimately introduced, it should not be in some ad hoc literary historical way, but rather as a matter of poetic thought; the high-song, a skylark-nightingale of romantic tradition, is revised by an inverse sublime or modernist transumption. Yet I still feel that the high-song isn't in or around the poem.

23. Milton's mode of querying birdsong about its discursive content—almost in the impatient manner of an ecphrastic query to a picture to speak up and explain itself—continues up through the middle of this century, at least, e.g., to the great Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer “Skylark” of 1941, which opens with the singer's asking the bird if it has anything to tell him/her.

24. American Poetry, 1:623-624.

25. It may be of some minute significance that in copying these lines an initial typo yielded “questionsings.”