In one of his greatest poems, the English poet Wordsworth envisions nature overflowing with profound insights and transcendent wisdom. He sees it as:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Tintern Abbey (1798)
This “presence” was nature’s gift to Wordsworth, and one that inspired his imagination to compose many extraordinary poems. Those poems, in turn, have influenced many great poets who have come after him. One such poet is the American poet, Robert Frost. (See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1966, p. 662) In fact, when Frost’s early poems were published, many readers saw an American version and poetic descendent of Wordsworth in Frost’s bucolic poems of woods, streams, snow, and farm life. Poems such as “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Road Not Taken,” can often remind readers of Wordsworth’s poetry. But many of his other poems are distinctly and profoundly different from the philosophy that fills Wordsworth’s work. Frost’s poetry is never about nature; instead, it holds a mirror up to nature that reflects Frost’s vision of himself and his world. Many of his poems reveal this dynamic, but two in particular which illustrate this point are “The Oven Bird,” and “Come In.”
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, 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.
The poem opens with the speaker, whom we can take to be Frost himself, announcing “There is a singer everyone has heard,/Loud, mid-summer and mid-wood bird.” The language in these two lines depict one image, that of the oven bird, but projects (rather than reflects) a second image, of Frost the poet. The bird/bard duality, and the singer as poet/bard should be easily recognized by the reader. But a third figure can also be heard in these lines. The words, “mid-summer,” and “mid-wood,” echo, though perhaps slightly, the beginning of Dante’s Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per selva oscura.” (“Midway upon the journey of our life/Ifound myself within a dark wood.”)
Like the great Italian bard, Frost was at a “midpoint” in life. He was approaching forty at the time he wrote “The Oven Bird,” which was published in 1916. Unlike Dante, who incorporates himself as the narrator in his poem, Frost acts as a listener who reports what he hears through the bird’s singing. Rather than introduce himself as a first person speaker, Frost has chosen the unseen bird to say for him what he can only report to us. First, he states that “everyone has heard” the “Loud” singing of this bird and that the bird “makes the solid tree trunks sound again.” By doing so, Frost expands the bird’s voice to resonate beyond the singleness of an individual, first-person speaker to that of a universal voice communicating to all human beings. Each year, the bird's song will “sound” the same song about the constant flow of time. The months will pass, and spring "leaves" and "flowers" will always grow old and fall, darkening the sky with “a moment of overcast” that forebodes the coming of fall, and the fragile brevity of life. This unchanging reality of change is mimicked by the reverberating parallel syntax of “He says…” “He says…” “He says…”
The immediate moment after the “moment of overcast” comes the statement upon which the entire poem is composed: “And comes that other fall we name the fall.” Frost the listener, and the reader, are confronted by two falls, the seasonal one and the biblical Fall of Adam and Eve, the fall that brought death into the world. Since that death is ubiquitous as the “highway dust [that] is over all,” the bird “knows in singing not to sing”; he knows that though there is joy in the beauty in nature, it is ephemeral and will always be moving toward death. The poem then ends as it only can, with the bird singing eternally that question beyond human language and understanding, “The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing.” That question discerns the mutable nature of human flesh that Frost hears in nature.
Frost’ “The Oven Bird” typifies his unsentimental vision of nature. He sees, or in this case hears, the limits of knowledge and mortality. Nowhere in his vision is there the slightest flicker of the sublime or transcendent and that is what makes him so different from Wordsworth. Though Wordsworth also felt the weight of the human condition, as he acknowledges in “Tintern Abbey,” he finds a way to receive the transcendent spirit of nature; but by transcending humanity, Wordsworth also tries to transcend reality. Frost, on the other hand, is a realist. Beauty may come through the song of a bird, a tree, a snowfall, but for Frost reality always permeates nature and his imagination.
Another Frost poem that contrasts starkly with the transcendence Wordsworth envisions is “Come In.” In the poem, Frost encounters once again bird song:
Come In
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music–hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lied 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.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn’t been.
In the poem, the speaker comes to “the edge of the woods,” hears “Thrush music,” and immediately exclaims “Hark!” The speaker seems aroused by the bird’s voice, and about to hear the sublime music of nature. That possibility diminishes almost immediately as he shifts his attention from what he can hear to what he cannot see: “Now if it was dusk outside,/Inside it was dark.” The moment a transcendent insight might seem accessible, an impenetrable “dark” circumscribes his vision. No matter how hard he peers into the woods, he hears but never sees. So as he listens to the thrush’s music, he deduces that the bird also cannot see, and therefore cannot “better its perch.” He further concludes that since “The last of the light of the sun/That had died in the west” the thrush has one song left to sing.
By stanza 4, it is clear that nature is no realm for experiencing transcendence. The speaker searches “Far in the pillared dark” after the song of the thrush, but the music recedes: “Thrush music went,” and the song he now hears is “Almost like a call to come in/To the dark and lament.” This “dark” lamentation, though, isn’t emanating from the thrush, but rather from the darkness his imagination envisions. The thrush’s music, which would in Wordsworth kindle light and lightness, in Frost becomes the penetrating realism that can be seen in his poetry. He redirects his gaze and ours: “But no I was out for stars:/I would not come in.” The last two lines of the poem pronounce further the difference between these two poets: “I meant not even if asked,/And I hadn’t been.” The song of the bird calls to him, but he is not willing to follow it beyond the boundaries physical life encompasses. As in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost lingers on the periphery of mystical or transcendent experience, but always decides to remain earthbound where his sensibility captures a truth no less worthy than Wordsworth's.