Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’

Decay in the Lush Midst

Jun 18, 2007 Linda Sue Grimes

Frost's speaker in "The Oven Bird" explores the same mystery that presents itself in the little eight-line poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

The speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird” asks the profound question: “. . . what to make of a diminished thing.” He places this question, along with other statements, in the mouth of a bird who has learned “in singing not to sing.”

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet with the rime scheme, AABCBDCD EEFGFG. The octave sets up the series of diminished things, and the sestet offers the conclusion drawn about their existence. The sestet does not, however, resolve the problem, but instead concludes that the problem exists.

The Octave: “There is a singer everyone has heard”

Despite the exaggeration that everyone has heard this singer, this oven bird, the speaker makes his notion clear that the bird’s song is fairly common. In the middle of the summer season, this bird can be heard chirping loudly in the middle of a forest: he “makes the solid tree trunks sound again.” His singing seems to be bouncing off the tree trunks.

According to the speaker, the bird is not just singing but also more importantly making statements about the flowers and trees and about the seasons' duration. Even though it is mid-summer, ordinarily considered a lovely and lush time of year, the bird is asserting that by mid-summer the “leaves are old,” which in terms of leaves is true. In spring, they are young, but by mid-summer, they are at least mature adults.

Also, the flowers are old and less important than the spring flowers: only a tenth in importance, according to this speaker’s claim. The early bloomers such as the pear and the cherry have shed all their blooms, and they “went down in showers / On sunny days a moment overcast.” The blooms fell from the trees and as they fell, they are like clouds covering the sun on a sunny day.

The Sestet: “And comes that other fall we name the fall”

The speaker then says that after the falling leaves of early spring, the real fall season will soon be upon the landscape, because mid-summer has moved closer to the onset of autumn. The speaker continues to report what the oven bird is saying, and he claims that the bird says, “the highway dust is over all.” Mid-summer dryness has made the dust scatter over the grass, flowers, leaves, and even people. The dryness of summer reminds one of the spiritual dryness that the poet T. S. Eliot decried in his modernist poetry, and Eliot, of course, is a slightly younger contemporary of Frost.

The speaker then says that the bird would stop singing and be like other birds, that is, not report the ideology of the state of affairs, but the bird knows exactly what to report, and so he concludes with the profound issue of the mystery of diminishment. He has no insight to offer, just the question: what is one to think about things that lose their leaves, and seasons that become covered with dust, after having promised such lush beauty in their earlier days.

The speaker has no answer, and apparently, neither does the bird, because the sonnet simply stops with the introduction of the question.

Other Frost articles:

• Frost’s "Mending Wall"
• Frost’s Snow and Woods
• Robert Frost’s Tricky Poem
• Robert Frost’s "Bereft": Hissing Leaves

Summer Poem Poll

Please take a moment to vote for your favorite summer poem in this month’s poll. Your choices are:

1. Emily Dickinson’s “I know a place where Summer strives”

2. John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Barefoot Boy”

3. James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Swimmin’ Hole”

4. Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird”

5. Amy Lowell’s “Penumbra”

The poll is located under the blog on the homepage of the Poetry site. Thank you for participating in this month’s poll.

The copyright of the article Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’ in Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’ in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Oven Bird