The Oven Bird (4)

If we think our own lives tragic, and I certainly view my own life as often difficult, consider Robert Frost's: his father died when he was 11, leaving the family destitute; his mother was a depressive, dying of cancer 15 years later; and both Frost and his wife, Elinor, suffered from depression. Of their six children one died of cholera at a very young age; one was committed to a mental hospital; one died just three days after being born; one died of fever after giving birth; and one committed suicide. Elinor herself developed cancer in 1937 and died the following year.

I love Robert Frost's poetry. One of his great English friends, who encouraged Frost in his own work, was Edward Thomas, probably my favourite English nature poet after Wordsworth and John Clare. Indeed, it was in England where Frost's poems were first published.

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

This sonnet is, I think, quite a well known one of Frost's, and among my favourite poems of his. It's open to various interpretations (just consider the different meanings of the word 'fall'). If you're interested, this link will take you to some critical analysis. However, it's probably best simply to enjoy the poem, and ponder yourself what Frost means when he writes '. . . he knows in singing not to sing.'

Myself, I think the poem is ultimately about how all of us are capable somehow of framing — in inadequate, less-than-pretty, ordinary words or songs or in other ways — a voice, an utterance, a protest, a lament, a celebration even. Even if time is running out, if we have fallen from grace and innocence, if things are 'diminished', there is still that sort-of song. And, of course, Frost the poet frames these subtle thoughts in this wonderful sonnet, which is almost conversational in tone, yet beautifully modulated: a song, indeed — though a 'new' kind of song in the canon, repudiating the high-flown and rhetorical language of the poetic past.

Walk The Line

Straight is the line of Duty

Curved is the line of Beauty

Follow the straight line, thou shalt see

The curved line ever follow thee

WILLIAM MACCALL

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line

JOHNNY CASH

Horizontals ...

 

... and verticals ...

... on the Viking Way ...

Sometimes two lines intersect and you have to make a choice: either the public bridleway or the restricted byway. Wonder which way I'll choose today? Will I make the same choice tomorrow? (Don't you think the restricted byway sounds more exciting?)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth

ROBERT FROST

I Walk The Line (please click for related post) 

Stopping By Woods

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

ROBERT FROST

It's a good time of year to enjoy and reflect on this lovely poem, I think. The snow's still lying all around. And, as we approach the end of one year and the beginning of another, it's a time when many of us look both backwards and forwards, and consider paths taken and not taken, choices made and not made.

I suppose this and The Road Not Taken are two of Frost's most well-known poems, constantly cropping up in anthologies and in lists of people's favourite verses. Both seem artlessly simple, yet are crafted with enormous skill. Both contain deeper mysteries and have half-hidden undercurrents. Both are about the choices we make in life.

In Stepping By Woods we are confronted with a choice: to succumb to the deep, dark, alluring wild wood or to carry on with the journey on which we have embarked. There's no doubt what the horse wants to do. He gives his harness bells a shake as if to say: onwards! There's still a long way to go! To which reminder the rider responds, shakes off his reverie, and realises there are still many miles to cover, much life still to pursue.

There's always a choice we have to make: between society's safe village and the individual's lonely, risky journey; between the snowy track and the dark, dangerous but strangely enticing forest; between, if you like, the rational and the irrational, between life and death. But actually it's not clear if the choice is as clear-cut as that, if it's really a straightforward choice between one path or the other.

This ambiguity, this mystery, lies at the poem's heart, I believe. What a wealth of meaning in such a deceptively simple poem!

3 Poems

I've been dipping again into The Golden Treasury Of Poetry. 3 poems leaped out at me. The 1st is by Robert Frost and is called The Runaway. It's a good choice for this time of year:

The Runaway

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'

What a word picture Frost paints here! You can just feel the cold, hear the hooves, see the falling snowflakes and the whites of the colt's eyes.

Apart from Shakespeare's, the sonnets of Keats are some of the most perfect sonnets ever written. This sonnet, On The Grasshopper And The Cricket - among other poems by Keats - also appears in The Golden Treasury:

On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Yes, how we yearn for summer during these last endless wintry months!

Finally, there's this short, succinct poem by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Frog-celebrities of Celebrity Big Brother, please take note...

The Unknown Bird

As well as Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, there is another poet called Thomas I like very much, and that is Edward Thomas (1878-1917). A somewhat melancholic and solitary figure, his life was cut tragically short when he was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in WWI. He scraped a living as a hack writer, producing reviews, nature essays, topographical works, even a novel - anything to earn a crust.

But his friend, the great American poet Robert Frost, encouraged him to uncover his true, literary talent - which lay in the writing of a type of unsentimental, acutely observant, rather melancholic nature poetry. His poems had a strong, posthumous influence on later English landscape and nature poets such as Ted Hughes. Thomas was a keen walker and walked through much of Southern England and Wales in his travels.

This poem, The Unknown Bird, is one of his finest poems, and one of my favourites:

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him:
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off -
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straighway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

There's a hint of mysticism in this poem I find very appealing, a sense of something being just out of reach, a communion with a spirit in nature which can give momentary release from the pain and suffering of human life. This chimes in very much with the theme of my recent post A Gift From The Gods.