The Wisdom of Frost Exposed in The Oven Bird Essays -- Oven Bird Essay

The Wisdom of Frost Exposed in The Oven Bird These seemingly negligible birds, symbols of the wrangle voice, have intuited the Oven Birds lesson and are the signs by which one is meant to divine Frosts acceptance of the linguistic implications of the fall from innocence. The Oven Bird, who watching That other fall we name the fall come to overcome the world with dust, Knows in singing not to sing. Instead, The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing. The fall, in necessitating two birth and death, imposes a continuum of identity that compromises naming. The process toward death, begun with birth, transmutes and gradually diminishes form, thus adding to the equation - words are things before they become words and things again when they do - an piece of inevitable, perpetual senescence. The birds of A Winter Eden say which buds are leaf and which are bloom, but the names are always premature or also late gold goes to green, dawn to day, everything rises and falls and is transformed. Thus the Oven Bird says, Midsummer is to spring as one to ten, because a season - this or any other - may only be codified analogously. Fall takes on a series of identities petal fall, the fall season, the first and fortunate fall, each of which bears, at the trice of articulation, the burden of a whole complex of moral, aesthetic, and literary valuations. This bird is a midsummer and a midwood bird that sees things at the moment of capitulation to the imperatives of fall. Loud, he predicts the inevitable, and his verbiage reflects the potential meaninglessness of a world in which one is forced to define a thing by what it departs from or approaches rather than what it is. To... ... ice are, afterward all, the inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision that endlessly regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic vocation and the state to which poetry - and if poetry then all language - has come. Frost anticipates modernisms lament and, it may be said, prefigures in his dualism its incertain palliative of self-referential irony. The lyric birds and the weary speakers tell us the genuine Frostian wisdom of achieving a commonsensical accommodation with the fallen world, while inciting at another, and ineffable, train a profound disquiet. Works Cited Robert Frost and a Poetic of Appetite. Cambridge University Press. 1994 Robert Frost in The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. Columbia University Press. 1997