Some years ago I heard an otherwise bright young man announce in the student union at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville a literary critical approach which promised to save time and which I have since come to think of as the arm's length theory of evaluative reading. He contended that he could hold a text before his eyes at arm's length and deem it worthy of reading or not based solely upon the shapes the words conspired to make on the page he was holding at bay. He was later prevailed upon to modify slightly this approach by agreeing that the number of permissible shapes might vary in direct proportion to the age of the poem.

The shape a poem assumes when it is a sonnet is no longer a permissible shape. My interlocutor had not quite the chronological surety of the fellow in the Viennese section of John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire, a cocksure young Bohemian who knew to the moment and in what cafes artistic movements had begun and ended. And so he wasn’t quite sure what to do with Robert Frost's “The Oven Bird.” The sonnet's being irregularly rhymed was in its favor. However, it was still a sonnet, and it was not a hundred years old. My friend felt that it was clearly on the cusp.

I suspect that Robert Frost did, too. Although I have as of yet seen nothing in print about the matter, I feel certain that, whatever is the range of possible referents for “the diminished thing” of the poem's last line, it must include the sonnet form itself.

“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.

(119–20)

To be sure, the sonnet form had not in 1916 fallen into quite the disrepute it was later to encounter. E. A. Robinson won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes in the 1920's with a body of poetry liberally laced with sonnets, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's vogue was yet to come. However, Frost's poem deals not with utter exhaustion but, rather, diminution. When a marriage or a season or a poetic form hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, what is to be done? That is the question the oven bird frames, according to our persona/paraphraser. I propose that one answer to the oven bird's question is “The Oven Bird” a weirdly-rhymed, but almost monotonously metrical, sonnet. And if the question is framed “in all but words,” the answer is framed in nothing but words, the words that make up “The Oven Bird.”

Mark Van Doren feels that the rhyme scheme of the poem is odd enough to disqualify it from categorization as a sonnet:

All of the rhymes have been telling, for these pentameters chime in a strange, wayward fashion, promising a sonnet (the poem is fourteen lines) yet giving none. The rhyme now is expressive of the dreariness the bird suddenly feels, remembering the dust; though it is a dreariness he can overcome, for he keeps on talking.

(76)

I see nothing in the poem's rhyming character expressive of dreariness. It’s rather a startling omnium gatherum of schemes, featuring a couple of couplets, a duo of terza rima triplets, and a closing quatrain rhyming abab (although by the time we get to it, we have moved down the alphabet to fgfg). The couplets enclose the triplets and in so doing hint at the abba scheme of the Petrarchan octave.

Structure in a Petrarchan sonnet means an octave and a sestet; in a Shakespearean sonnet we expect three quatrains and a closing couplet. Frost's nifty little hybrid adds two and four and divides by two. “The Oven Bird” makes of the diminished thing of the sonnet form a tripartite arrangement. The first three lines announce the singer everyone has heard. The next seven translate his song into speech. The final four sum up what he has said. It’s as if we’re in the realm of the disjunctive presque-Petrarchan here: a septet is interrupted three-sevenths of the way through by another septet. The interrupted septet then resumes in line eleven and marches to its conclusion.

The meter of the poem is not quite so exciting, although its almost dreary regularity is perhaps as it should be, given the humdrum nature of the oven bird's report on the season. There is, however, one line which, metrically speaking, offers almost as much variety as do the rhyme scheme and the structure: “Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird …” To my way of hearing, this line features a trochee, a spondee, a pyrrhic, an iamb, and another spondee.

What to make of a diminished thing? A sonnet the deliciously grab bag nature of which makes the sonnet form, given all the possibilities here realized, feel like anything but a diminished thing.

The scene shifts. Now the one playing youth to my crabbed age is a current student of mine at Ouachita, an articulate and remarkably well-read fellow who for some reason views poetic forms with genuine suspicion.

“You mean Borges wrote a sonnet?” he queries, incredulity blistering his tongue. “Jorge Luis Borges?” I tell him yes, Borges wrote at least two sonnets about which I know and which I have read.

“Composición escrita en un ejemplar de la gesta de Beowulf”

A veces me pregunto qué razones
Me mueven a estudiar sin esperanza
De precisión, mientras mi noche avanza,
La lengua de los ásperos sajones.
Gastada por los años la memoria
Deja caer la en vano repetida
Palabra y es así como mi vida
Teje y desteje su cansada historia.
Será (me digo entonces) que de un modo
Secreto y suficiente el alma sabe
Que es inmortal y que su vasto y grave
Círculo abarca todo y puede todo.
Más allá de este afán y de este verso
Me aguarda inagotable el universo.

“Poem Written In A Copy of Beowulf”

At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

(Qtd. in Monegal 285–86)

On the face of it this poem appears to be a real cri de coeur a lyric from which has disappeared utterly the distance between author and persona. Indeed Borges was aging and going blind when in the late 1950s he undertook the study of Anglo-Saxon. “Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf” was published in 1964. Even the title suggests the casual, a something jotted down in a margin in a moment of despair which turns, upon reflection, into another moment, this one of grand affirmation.

Yet there is nothing casual about the poem's structure. Like “The Oven Bird” Borges' poem blends elements of earlier sonnet forms. The feel of it is essentially Petrarchan, for it features a crisp turn in line nine, along with a rhyme scheme in the octave which is almost Petrarchan: abbacddc. The hint of the Shakespearean comes in with the change of rhymes in the second quatrain of the octave and, again, in the closing couplet. The allusion to sonnet-writing is for me even slyer than Frost's.

The persona convinces himself in the sonnet's octave that the soul is immortal (“it must be”) and that “its vast, encompassing / circle can take in all, can accomplish all.” One of the things the soul can accomplish is the composition of yet another powerful expression of our condition in the form of a sonnet, that form which, like the poem's persona, is weary of time but which has accomplished much and which can accomplish more, despite the ravages of age. Two projects are saved in the poem's octave: the persona will continue to study the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons and the sonnet will conclude itself, understanding that beyond all anxiety and writing awaits a universe which can neither exhaust nor be exhausted by forms and which invites all manner of moods and styles to behold it.

The universe of Borges' poem proves more receptive than those who object to sonnets and other poetic forms on the grounds that something has happened in our century to prevent powerful expression from occurring within the precincts of preordained verbal structures. A colleague of Jack Butler at the College of Santa Fe has assured Jack that poetic forms are still permissible (how kind of him!), but that nothing really important is going to happen in them. In Writing Poetry: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them, David Kirby teams up with Galway Kinnell to produce a profoundly baffling passage:

Following World War I, it is the general consensus that the ignorant armies were victorious. Writers of the modern era can have no illusions about the disappearance of the world's grace, says Kinnell which is why “for modern poets—for everyone after Yeats—rhyme and meter amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing. … In rhyme and meter one has to be concerned with how to say something, perhaps anything which fulfills the formal requirements. It is hard to move into the open that way.”

(16)

What have World War I and the supposed disappearance of the world's grace got to do with poetic form? If global catastrophe renders formal possibilities in poetry impossible, why didn’t the Black Death stop Petrarch in his tracks? How is it that Yeats could move into the open with rhyme and meter but nobody after him can? If nobody after him has been able to move into the open in rhyme and meter, have I hallucinated the great sonnet by Borges discussed above? I’ve never been present at a more powerful moving into the open than the one which takes place in the sestet of the Borges poem and which is accompanied by the stately drumbeat of loose iambics and the splendid ticking of terminal rhymes: modo/sabe/grave/todo/verso/universo.

In a true Petrarchan sonnet, written to celebrate the invention of the sonnet form, Borges declares the resources of the sonnet to be as limitless as the sequestrations of night and the revelations of day.

“Un poeta del siglo XIII”

Vuelve a mirar los arduos borradores
De aquel primer soneto innominado,
La página arbitraria en que ha mezclado
Tercetos y cuartetos pecadores.
Lima con lenta pluma sus rigores
Y se detiene. Acaso le ha llegado
Del porvenir y de su horror sagrado
Un rumor de remotos ruiseñores.
¿Habrá sentido que no estaba solo
Y que el arcano, el increíble Apolo
Le habrá revelado un arquetipo,
Un ávido cristal que apresaría
Cuánto la noche cierra o abre el día:
Dédalo, laberinto, enigma, Edipo?

“A Poet Of The Thirteenth Century”

Think of him laboring in the Tuscan halls
on the first sonnet (that word still unsaid),
the undistinguished pages, filled with sad
triplets and quatrains, without heads or tails.
Slowly he shapes it; yet the impulse fails.
He stops, perhaps at a strange slight music shed
from time coming and its holy dread,
a murmuring of far-off nightingales.
Did he sense that others were to follow,
that the arcane, incredible Apollo
had revealed an archetypal thing,
a whirlpool mirror that would draw and hold
all that night could hide or day unfold:
Daedalus, labyrinth, riddle, Oedipus King?

(Qtd. in Monegal 277)

In Frost and Borges, one finds blooming—having bloomed—figures of capable imagination, poets able to hold up to experience that exquisite “whirlpool mirror that would draw and hold / all that night could hide or day unfold, …” and to make of the amalgam of experience and carefully-wrought mirror such gems as “The Oven Bird” and “Composición escrita en un ejemplar de la gesta de Beowulf.”

Works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Borges: A Reader. Ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Kirby, David. Writing Poetry: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1989.

Van Doren, Mark. Introduction to Poetry. New York: The Dryden Press, 1951.